"First love is infinite in its variety but singular in its effect. Whether it is a religion, a drug, a book, or a person you fall for, you can expect to emerge on the other side nothing less than totally transformed."
-Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith
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Quote number 172 :
“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”
An excerpt from We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy:
On a summer night in 1961, James Baldwin presented himself on the doorstep of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He had come for dinner because he heard in the language of Elijah Muhammad someone willing, at that time, to do the rarest of things: talk plainly in public about the pain and fury that Black people had suffered at the hands of white racism. The story of this dinner and Baldwin’s reflections on it, make up the bulk of his much-celebrated 1963 book The Fire Next Time.
Over the course of the evening, Baldwin found himself growing increasingly uncomfortable, even alarmed. The men and women were separated at the Nation of Islam, and the women were very clearly subservient. Everything Elijah Muhammad said was met with immediate and total affirmation from the group, in a rhythmic formulaic manner befitting a cult, not a community. Did they really think they could create an entirely separate Black nation and economy? If Elijah Muhammad said so, they did. Did Elijah Muhammad really think that white people could only ever be evil and that their main purpose was to find ever more creative ways to poison Black people? Baldwin better not share that he was on his way to the North Side of the city to have a drink with a white friend later that night.
Ultimately, Baldwin comes to the realization that while he understands Elijah Muhammad’s anger, he does not want to live in Elijah Muhammad’s world. “As I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance is achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then?”
He is referring to the Black people he grew up with in Harlem, and coming to the realization that, although Elijah’s anger is meant to save them, it won’t because it can’t. Anger doesn’t construct, it only destroys. Burns everything. Including those who breathe the fire—however justified and righteous—in the first place.
Let me use an illustration from Game of Thrones. In the early seasons of the series, we watch Daenerys Targaryen grow into her leadership and set her sights on the Iron Throne. She is righteous and idealistic, dedicating herself to the cause of oppressed people across the Seven Kingdoms. She travels to city after city with her dragons at her side, inspiring crowds with her speeches about equality and freedom, and directing her dragons to burn down the structures of enslavement.
Along the way, she learns that if you burn a structure down, people expect you to build something better in its place. Dragon fire proves to be a powerful weapon against oppression, but a hazard to good governance. Dragons cannot tell the difference between a brutal slave master and an innocent farmer. They just scorch everything in sight.
Season after season, we see Daenerys struggle with governing, and become more and more wedded to her dragons. She increasingly sees the world through their eyes. Watching her become angrier and angrier, I couldn’t help but think about a twist on an old adage, “If all you have is the anger of dragon fire, the whole world looks like a structure to burn.”
The final episodes of the series bring this theme to its logical conclusion. When the bells ring at King’s Landing, announcing the surrender of the city, no look of relief or celebration crosses the face of Daenerys Targaryen. She does not think to herself that the day she has waited for these long and brutal years has finally arrived, and her golden reign of peace and justice might begin. She has had too much experience burning things down and too little building them up. She rides her dragon high into the sky, her whole body a clenched fist of oppositional fury even at the hour of her victory, and rains down a raging fire, murdering the very people she had promised to save.
And she is not finished yet. In her first formal speech as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, she promises more death, more destruction, more burning down of structures. This madness, even though she now sits upon the Iron Throne and has all the power she needs to build a better world.
The Daenerys Targaryen spirit lives in history as much as it does in fiction. The French Revolution began with the cry of liberty, equality, and fraternity and then gave way to five years of the Reign of Terror and, finally, a new dictator, Napoleon. Such has been the fate of more than one movement that began with high ideals. Too many activists, in their zeal to overthrow the Shah, wound up installing the Ayatollah. Some of them became the Ayatollah.
So what is to be done with righteous anger? Baldwin transforms his into working for the possibility of America.
“I am not a ward of America,” he writes in chapter 11 of The Fire Next Time, “I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.” That gives him both greater privileges, and also, in his estimation, greater responsibilities. He writes, “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.” And what should we do with that responsibility? Here is Baldwin’s answer: come together across racial lines to “achieve our country” and, by doing this, “change the history of the world.”
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One of the really big problems of the postmodern nature of wokeness is that it not only doesn’t build anything, it’s that it can’t build anything. It’s only capable of deconstruction, not construction.
[image description: a brown box with goldenrod banners reading “Cultivating your own faith while embracing religious pluralism, Blessed Are the Binary Breakers, a multi-faith podcast of trans stories.” Between the banners is a quote from Eboo Patel in his book Acts of Faith reading, “Brother Wayne didn’t see boxes or borders. He happily taught us mediation techniques and introduced us to Hindu and Buddhist writers. He had spent years studying both traditions, and the encounter with them had served to strengthen his Catholic faith and help him rethink it along the way. ...The tradition you were born into [or converted into] was your home, Brother Wayne told me, but...it should be a home with the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen. ‘It’s good to have wings,’ he would say. ‘but you have to have roots, too.’” / end id]
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"It's good to have wings, but you have to have roots too":
Cultivating your faith while embracing religious pluralism
In this episode of Blessed Are the Binary Breakers, Avery reiterates how opening oneself to glimpses of the spiritual outside of one's own perspective can enrich one's connection to divinity and to humanity -- rather than being a threat to one's own tradition.
The passages Avery shares in this episode come from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' Making Space for Difference, Philip Vinod Peackock's "Some Insights on Imago Dei," Rev. Jonathan Thunderword's From Christendom to Freedom, and Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith.
Talking Points:
(3:31 - 9:01) Peering out from our own boxes to avoid stagnation - seeking knowledge is an act of faith, not fear
(9:02 - 11:31) Rabbi Sacks and Philip Vinod Peacock on no one person or group fully representing the Image of God
(11:32 - 16:02) Introducing Rev. Jonathan Thunderword - a Black, trans, omni-faith, multi-spiritual practitioner and author of From Christendom to Freedom: Journeymaking with a Black Transgender Elder
(16:03 - 21:03) Engaging in multiple religions in his search for faith that nourishes rather than harms; being shaped by all of them
(21:04 - 22:50) Introducing Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core and author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation
(22:51 - 28:25) Choosing between religious totalitarianism and religious pluralism - active commitment
(28:26 - 36:52) It's okay to personally prefer and maintain your own tradition as your "home" - but leave the windows open "so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen."
Find links for where to listen / read the transcript here.
"First love is infinite in its variety but singular in its effect. Whether it is a religion, a drug, a book, or a person you fall for, you can expect to emerge on the other side nothing less than totally transformed."
"First love is infinite in its variety but singular in its effect. Whether it is a religion, a drug, a book, or a person you fall for, you can expect to emerge on the other side nothing less than totally transformed."
The past 10 years have done major damage to our social fabric.
By EBOO PATEL
Originally published by Persuasion, September 21, 2025.
When I was a graduate student in England 25 years ago, I fell in love with the novel White Teeth. It was written by a woman named Zadie Smith, and I thought it perfectly captured the music of pluralism. Smith basically fictionalized the neighborhood she grew up in northwest London. It was a neighborhood of genuine diversity—there were rich and poor, middle class and working class. There were longtime residents who were white English Anglicans and atheists, and more recent communities of Jamaican Evangelicals and Pakistani Muslims.
From her perch in a council estate (which is the British term for a housing project) Zadie Smith wrote about the friendships and feuds, the romances and reconciliations, of this motley crew of friends and neighbors, a motley crew she clearly loved.
One of my favorite scenes took place in a playground. Zadie Smith sets it up like this: “It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.”
My research was in London, and every time I passed a playground, I found myself looking for those characters—looking for children of different backgrounds whose identities were supposed to be on a collision course, even internally, and yet who were instead coming together to form that most precious of human creations—a community.
Here is how Zadie Smith described this signal achievement in human civilization: “we have finally slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort.”
White Teeth was a blockbuster success. Think of it as the Hamilton of its era. Zadie Smith found herself a global figure, taking up university positions and writing fellowships in different parts of the world.
In 2016, Smith returned to the old neighborhood. She came to tend to a family member who had an illness. One of the first things she noticed was that the playground she had immortalized in her first novel, the one which held together those children whose names were on a collision course, had a new fence around it, a fence with tall bamboo slats between the bars that blocked views from the outside in, and the inside out.
She started seeing fences all around her old neighborhood, around the entire city of London, in fact. Mansions had fences, public schools had fences, religious communities had fences—actual, physical barriers.
We all remember the divisive election that took place in the United States in 2016. There was a British version of that: the Brexit referendum.
Smith noticed that Brexit revealed a different kind of fence, an invisible fence, what she started calling the fence of “Right Opinion”—too tall to climb over, too thick to see through, sometimes electrified, making it ever so easy to caricature the people on the other side, and so hard to actually talk to them.
It was a situation that occurred at a playground which brought this truth home, the very playground where Zadie Smith had based that scene from White Teeth. Zadie’s little daughter was playing with another mother’s little son. They seemed to be quite enamored of one another. When Zadie went to engage with the boy’s mother to suggest a playdate between her daughter and the other woman’s son, she noticed right away that the woman was about fifteen years younger, and white, and working class. There was a high likelihood that they were on the opposite sides of the Fence of Right Opinion with respect to Brexit.
In a real-life moment so fraught with tension that it could have been a scene in a novel, Smith and this other mother put their respective children in their respective strollers at the same time, and trudged up the hill to their respective houses virtually side by side, all in silence. Smith watched as the woman turned left into the very council estate in which she had grown up, while she turned right into the new development full of fine, large houses, including one with the shiny black door belonging to her. She felt the withering stare of the other mother: You live in one of the big houses. You are one of those.
And Smith had a sudden realization—the people with whom she disagreed, the people on the other side of the invisible fence, had their own version of Right Opinion.
The playdate never happened. Smith did not know how to start the conversation. The master novelist of pluralism was unable to find the language to climb over or see through the invisible fence.
Perhaps that irony struck Smith as much as it struck me, because a few months later she published an essay called “On Optimism and Despair.” It’s an essay that gives us a way forward by pulling a trick out of the writer’s magic hat—she changes the metaphor.
Instead of talking about people as being on opposite sides of the electrified Fence of Right Opinion, she talks about all of us as “complex musical scores.” It is the job of the conductor—whether a novelist or a civic leader—to coax out the melodies that, as she puts it, create “a finer music,” the music of pluralism.
It is a very similar metaphor to the one that the American inventors of cultural pluralism—Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, John Dewey and Jane Addams, to name a few—used. They were making the case for pluralism in the face of two other dominant models: the melting pot, which did not properly respect distinctive identity, and what Kallen called the Kultur Klux Klan, which wanted to destroy those identities. As I’vewritten previously:
[The Kultur Klux Klan] was based on the violent anti-black, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, and adhered to the view that “true Americans” were white Protestants and that everyone else was an alien. … The melting pot idea was that everyone could become an American—you simply had to change your name, stop speaking your native language, eat different food, and blend in.
Against these two models, Kallen held that our identities have value, those identities can be thought of as instruments, and together “the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization.”
That is the commitment we need to make in our civic institutions now, from small community-based organizations to large research universities. We need to be the people that others can count on to invite diverse instruments to the stage and to teach them to make music together.
By the way, your opinion may well be right—let’s assume it is. And the disagreement you have with another person who has a different right opinion is no doubt significant. And yet we cannot live in a society where two mothers whose children are enamored of one another find it so impossible to communicate that they can’t organize a playdate for their kids.
So let us see people as complex musical scores. Let us commit to coaxing out the melodies from each one and braiding them together into a beautiful song. And let us encourage as many people as possible to sing along.
Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.
This essay is adapted from Eboo Patel’s keynote address at the 2025 Interfaith Leadership Summit, delivered to an audience of college students, faculty, campus administrators, and civic leaders.
Awakenings by Rabbi Joshua Stanton, Rabbi Benjamin Spratt
Awakenings by Rabbi Joshua Stanton, Rabbi Benjamin Spratt
American Jewish Transformations in Identity, Leadership, and Belonging
Foreword: Rev Kaji DousaAfterword: Dr. Eboo Patel
Why are religious organizations on the decline? What changes have caused many of them to lose touch with modern spiritual needs? What does it take to remain relevant in today’s world? Rabbis Joshua Stanton and Benjamin Spratt take on these and other critical questions facing…
