ING and American Pluralism

By Maha Elgenaidi, Founder and Executive Director (Bio)

November 20, 2025

This is excerpted from a speech I delivered at the Graduate Theological Union on November 13, 2025, under the same title.

I’m delighted to share that I recently joined the Interfaith Civic Pluralism Fellowship. It’s an honor to be affiliated with Interfaith America, an organization that activates leaders to embrace the power of pluralism.

The fellowship deeply affirms the work we’ve been doing for years at ING, and it offers a powerful platform to expand that work nationally.

With that in mind, it’s a privilege to talk with you today about two themes that have shaped my life’s work: ING itself and the ongoing, unfinished project of American pluralism.

At this moment in our country, when polarization feels like it’s defining so many of our interactions, it’s more important than ever to return to a simple truth: diversity is a fact, but pluralism is a choice. And that choice requires engagement, understanding, and intentional bridge-building.

Today, I want to share ING’s model for that work, the context in which we operate, and what pluralism requires from all of us in this moment.

What We Mean by American Pluralism

When I talk about pluralism, I don’t simply mean demographic diversity.

Pluralism is a practice: people of different backgrounds engaging one another, learning from one another, and shaping shared spaces together.

This work is grounded in two core commitments:

1. Engagement across our differences: religious, cultural, racial, and ideological.
2. Belonging, where every person is recognized and treated as part of the collective “we.”

Pluralism is not automatic. It doesn’t emerge just because a society is diverse. It emerges when people choose to build relationships and when institutions choose to cultivate understanding, dignity, and trust.

That’s where ING comes in.

The Story and Mission of ING

ING began more than thirty years ago, immediately after the first Persian Gulf War, with a simple but urgent goal: to increase religious and cultural literacy and to humanize Muslims at a time of rising stereotypes and systemic misrepresentations.

What started as a small grassroots effort to correct misconceptions has grown into a national organization that trains educators, corporations, universities, law enforcement agencies, healthcare professionals, civic leaders, and communities across the country.

Today, ING has evolved into Intercultural Networks Group, reflecting our broader commitment—not only to Muslim inclusion, but to the full spectrum of interreligious and intercultural understanding across all communities.

Our model is anchored in three core commitments:

1. Education — providing accurate, accessible content on religion, culture, bias, and belonging.
2. Engagement — creating opportunities for people to meaningfully encounter those different from themselves, rather than remaining in silos.
3. Empowerment — equipping individuals and institutions with tools to practice inclusion sustainably, long after we leave the room.

But what truly defines ING is our approach: respectful, evidence-based, relationship-centered, and resolutely nonpartisan.

What Makes ING Distinct in the Pluralism Landscape

There are many organizations doing important work in interreligious inclusion and belonging spaces. ING’s distinct contribution lies in a few key strengths.

1. First, we take an interreligious and intercultural approach. We don’t teach about Muslims in isolation; we teach in the context of America’s full religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity. Our speakers include Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus, as well as African American, Asian American, Indigenous, and Hispanic/Latino speakers working alongside one another in both education and engagement.
2. Second, we bring together local lived experience and national professional training. Our speakers are members of the communities they address. They’re not abstract experts. They’re neighbors, parents, physicians, business leaders, and students.
3. Third, our work is education, not advocacy. We don’t lobby for specific policies. We focus on increasing knowledge, decreasing bias, and creating space for honest engagement.
4. Fourth, ING specializes in skill-building:
   • How to disagree without dehumanizing.
   • How to approach sensitive topics with nuance.
   • How to support students, colleagues, or communities in times of tension.
5. Fifth, we offer a scalable, nationally recognized model that adapts to the unique needs of each institution. Our trainings are grounded in local context but backed by a robust national framework, allowing us to collaborate effectively with thousands of institutions—private universities and community colleges, corporate teams and public school districts, law enforcement agencies and healthcare providers, city governments and community nonprofits.

This approach has enabled us to work across thousands of institutions.

The State of Religious Pluralism in America Today

To understand ING’s work, we have to be honest about the moment we’re living through.

Religious literacy remains low in the United States. Many Americans cannot distinguish between Arabs and Muslims, or between criticism of governments and prejudice toward people.

We are also seeing:

• Rising Islamophobia and antisemitism
• Heightened fear and vulnerability across multiple communities
• Escalating global tensions spilling into schools, campuses, workplaces, and civic spaces
• The spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and online echo chambers that distort reality and deepen mistrust
• Increased political polarization, where complex issues are reduced to binaries
• Erosion of shared facts, making honest dialogue harder to sustain
• Mainstreaming of dehumanizing rhetoric in media and public life
• Legislative and policy debates that weaponize identity and intensify division
• A decline in opportunities for cross-community interactions, leaving people isolated within their own cultural or ideological circles

These challenges don’t mean pluralism is failing.

They mean pluralism is being tested.

And that is precisely why ING exists.

Our job is not to pretend that these tensions don’t exist.

Our job is to help individuals and institutions navigate them with clarity, empathy, and integrity—and to build the skills that make pluralism possible even in difficult times.

ING’s Practical Contributions to Pluralism

Let me share a few of the ways ING strengthens American pluralism.

1. Education as Prevention: We provide foundational religious-literacy programs: diverse religious perspectives on a variety of contemporary issues, interreligious understanding, cultural competency training, and modules on stereotypes and structural forms of bias. These sessions help leaders, educators, and teams recognize the difference between free speech and harmful speech, between political disagreement and prejudice, between discomfort and discrimination.
2. Humanizing Communities Through Real Voices:  Our speaker bureaus are at the heart of ING’s model. They share lived experiences, what it’s like to be Muslim or Jewish, African American, Latine, or Indigenous. People learn not from textbooks alone, but from actual neighbors. This is where empathy is built.
3. Restorative and Trauma-Informed Engagement: In times of conflict, outrage, or fear, ING offers facilitated conversations that are structured, safe, and grounded in real listening. We help schools and workplaces move from defensiveness to understanding, from accusation to curiosity, from silence to constructive dialogue.
4. Applying Religious and Ethical Teachings: A distinctive element of ING’s approach is grounding pluralism in the moral teachings of various traditions—particularly religious values of compassion, justice, and dignity. We show communities that pluralism isn’t a political trend; it is a spiritual practice cultivated across traditions.
5. Tools for Responding to Bias: We train faculty, staff, and employers to recognize and respond to bias, hate incidents, doxxing, and targeted harassment—issues that are increasingly common. Pluralism requires skills, not just goodwill.

Impact Stories

Rather than listing numbers, I want to share a few stories that show what this work looks like in practice.

• At a major university, after a sharp rise in both anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish incidents, ING facilitated a series of joint Muslim–Jewish trainings on Islamophobia, antisemitism, and related biases for staff, faculty, and senior administrators. What changed wasn’t just knowledge—it was culture. Participants reported that, for the first time, the institution was applying a consistent, uniform framework to address hate regardless of which community was targeted. The training helped shift the campus from reactive crisis management to proactive, community-centered practice. As a result, we were invited back by multiple schools across the university.
• In a K–12 district, teachers who felt overwhelmed by classroom discussions on Israel–Palestine—conversations that were triggering for Muslim, Arab and Jewish students alike—used ING’s case-study model to guide their approach. Through facilitated practice, they learned how to name bias when it surfaced, acknowledge layered trauma, and hold space for multiple truths while maintaining instructional impartiality allowing students to explore their own opinions and challenge their biases.  Several teachers later shared that this was the first time they felt they had concrete tools to support all their students without shutting down dialogue.
• In several corporate settings, employee teams that had previously avoided discussing religion altogether, out of fear of “saying the wrong thing” or violating secular boundaries, began integrating religious identity into their inclusion framework after participating in ING’s training. They implemented clear accommodation policies, opened voluntary interfaith employee circles, and normalized respectful conversation about belief and practice. Their employee engagement reports showed increased feelings of belonging and psychological safety.
• One of my favorite stories comes from a joint Muslim–Jewish panel on antisemitism and Islamophobia for a police academy. After we finished, a police lieutenant told the group he had been bracing for conflict, joking that he half-expected we’d be “duking it out.” Instead, he saw two communities modeling shared concern, compassion, and real listening. He said it was deeply meaningful to watch a Muslim speaker and a Jewish speaker address the impact of the Israel–Palestine crisis on their communities together rather than in opposition. It shifted his sense of what solidarity can look like.

These are small examples, but they reflect something profound:  When people connect in honest, structured, and compassionate ways, pluralism becomes possible.

The Abundance Theory of Power

I want to briefly introduce a framing that underlies our work; one I didn’t realize had a name until recently: The Abundance Theory of Power

A scarcity mindset says, “If your community gains, mine loses.”

An abundance mindset says, “Your safety strengthens my safety. Your dignity reinforces my dignity. Your belonging enhances my belonging.”

This is the essence of pluralism. It is not a zero-sum project. It is a shared project in which all of us rise.

And ING’s work is built on this premise, not competing for legitimacy but building collective capacity across communities.

What American Pluralism Requires From Us Now

So, what do we need today, in this moment of fractured national discourse?

1. Moral courage to name hate in all its forms. Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Arab racism, anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant, none of these can be selectively condemned. Pluralism collapses when we defend only our community and remain silent about harm to others.
2. A commitment to genuine understanding, especially with those we disagree with, from MAGA supporters at one end of the spectrum to Progressives at the other. Pluralism requires that we educate ourselves about the histories, identities, and lived experiences of communities different from our own. It is curiosity, not certainty, that keeps a diverse democracy alive.
3. Institutional responsibility for shaping inclusive environments.  Schools, workplaces, and civic institutions must invest in religious literacy, clear policies, and restorative approaches to conflict, not merely to prevent harm, but to cultivate cultures of dignity and respect.
4. Personal responsibility in our daily choices. Pluralism is practiced in the questions we ask, the assumptions we challenge, the conversations we enter, and the bridges we choose to build. It cannot be outsourced to nonprofits, educators, or government agencies.
5. A shared commitment to repair and relationship-building. In moments of tension, disagreement, or harm, pluralism requires us to turn toward each other rather than away—to listen, engage, clarify, apologize, and rebuild trust. Sustainable pluralism depends on the courage to repair, not retreat.

In Closing: Why I Do This Work

I want to close on a personal note.

I have spent more than three decades working to build understanding between Muslims and their neighbors, and over time, among many different communities across this nation. My belief in pluralism is not only civic; it is profoundly spiritual.

In my Islamic tradition, loving God and loving my neighbor, near or far, are not optional; they are obligations. These values echo across so many faiths and philosophical traditions, forming a shared moral language that calls us to see one another fully and to honor one another’s humanity. It is a social vision of the common good for all humankind, the beauty to which we are called.

What gives me hope is knowing that the vast majority of people want the same fundamental things: a country where their children are safe, known, and welcomed; where disagreement does not require dehumanization; where many communities can thrive, not in competition, but in shared flourishing.

That vision is at the heart of ING’s mission.

It is at the heart of American pluralism.

And it requires all of us—together—to bring it to life.

Thank you.