Interview with Eric Roux: “URI’s Strength Comes from the Grassroots”

Eric Roux has just been re-elected Chair of the Global Council of the United Religions Initiative (URI), the world’s largest grassroots interfaith movement. As URI enters a new phase guided by its 2025–2030 Strategic Framework, Roux begins his second mandate with an ambition to make the organization larger, stronger and more visible, while preserving what he considers its essential character: a deeply decentralized network whose strength comes from its grassroots communities. In this interview with The European Times, he reflects on what it takes to understand an organization as unusual as URI, the difference between interfaith dialogue and genuine cooperation, the role religious communities can play in preventing violence, and what years of working across religious boundaries have taught him about identity, difference and living together.

Juan Sanchez: You have just been re-elected Chair of URI’s Global Council. What do you want to achieve during this new mandate that you were not able to accomplish during your first one?

Eric Roux: My first mandate taught me something important: in a global organization like URI, the role of the Chair is not to arrive with a personal programme and ask everybody else to implement it. URI is much too diverse for that. My responsibility is to help this extraordinary diversity become a global force.

URI is also a rather unusual animal, and I think it takes years to really understand it. From the outside, you can look at the organizational chart, the regions, the Global Council, the staff, the Cooperation Circles, and think you understand how it works. You don’t. URI is a living network made of thousands of relationships, local realities, cultures, histories and initiatives. Some of the most important things happening in URI may be taking place very far from its formal structures.

I have been involved with URI for many years, I have served as a Trustee and as Chair, and I am still discovering new dimensions of it all the time. I actually think that is healthy. The day you believe you have completely understood an organization as diverse as URI is probably the day you start misunderstanding it.

During my first mandate, a great deal of work went into defining where we want URI to be by 2030. We now have a Strategic Framework. The challenge of this second mandate is much more exciting: to make it real.

And for me, one idea in that framework is particularly important: we need to do more than simply grow the network.

Of course we want URI to grow. We want more Cooperation Circles, more countries represented, more young people, more women, more Indigenous participation. But growth only matters if the network becomes stronger at the same time.

That means strengthening the capacity of our grassroots communities. URI exists because people, often with very limited resources, decide that religious difference should not be a reason to fear one another but an opportunity to work together. And when I speak about resources, I do not mean only money — even if money counts. I mean training, connections, knowledge, mentoring, access to partners, the possibility of learning from other Cooperation Circles, and the confidence and skills to act when their communities face real problems.

Our framework also asks us to become much more deliberate about impact. URI has always been very good at creating relationships across religions and cultures. Now we want to use the strength of those relationships even more effectively to prevent violence, defend freedom of religion or belief, heal communities affected by violence, and contribute to healing the Earth.

The other part is visibility. Extraordinary things are happening inside URI, but too few people outside the network know about them. I want the experience of people working at the grassroots to travel upwards — to universities, international institutions, governments, the United Nations and other places where policies are shaped.

And of course, none of this is the work of a Chair alone. One of the great privileges of my first mandate has been to work with an extraordinary and remarkably effective Executive Director, Karen Volker, with a staff whose commitment to URI is visible every day, and with my dedicated colleagues on the Global Council. The relationship between governance and staff matters enormously in an organization like ours. We each have different responsibilities, but when there is trust, respect and a shared sense of purpose, the whole network benefits. I am very conscious that whatever we achieve during this mandate will be a collective achievement.

Eric Roux and Karen Volker receiving an award on behalf of URI and William E. Swing, URI’s Founder, in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

But there is something important here: I, and we, do not want URI to become more centralized in order to achieve these goals.

Quite the contrary.

Our Strategic Framework is a compass, not a command-and-control system. The autonomy of our Cooperation Circles remains essential. My ambition for this second mandate is therefore very simple to express, even if it is difficult to achieve: a much larger URI, a much stronger URI, a much more visible URI and a URI whose global influence comes from the strength of its grassroots rather than from the strength of its headquarters.

JS: Interfaith dialogue is often praised, but it is also sometimes criticized for bringing together people who already agree with one another without changing realities on the ground. How does URI make sure that interfaith cooperation produces concrete results?

ER: I think that criticism is sometimes justified.

Dialogue can become comfortable. You invite people who already believe in dialogue, everybody agrees that peace is preferable to war, a photograph is taken, and everyone goes home.

That has its value, but it is not enough.

This is why I personally prefer speaking about interfaith cooperation rather than simply interfaith dialogue. Dialogue is a tool. Cooperation is what happens afterwards, or sometimes even before.

When a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jew, a member of an Indigenous tradition, an atheist, or someone from another worldview work together on something that matters to their community, something very different happens. They stop being representatives of categories and start becoming people who depend on one another.

And that changes relationships.

I have come to believe that one of the most powerful antidotes to prejudice is not simply knowing about somebody else. It is doing something with them.

When you have solved a problem together, defended somebody together, planted trees together, helped refugees together or stood together against violence, it becomes much more difficult to reduce the other person to a stereotype.

For me, that is where interfaith work becomes peacebuilding. Not when everybody agrees about religion — they probably never will — but when disagreement stops preventing cooperation.

JS: We are living through a period of wars, polarization, rising religious nationalism and increasing hostility toward minorities. What can an organization like URI realistically do in situations where religion itself is being used to divide communities?

ER: We must begin by being modest, even if not too much. URI is not going to stop every war, and interfaith organizations should not pretend that they possess some magical solution to geopolitical conflicts. I’d love to be able to say that, and maybe in the future that will be true. But not yet, unfortunately.

But there is another mistake we should avoid: believing that because we cannot solve everything, we can do nothing. We can always do something!

Violence rarely begins with violence.

Before people accept that another community can be attacked, excluded or humiliated, something has normally happened beforehand. People have been turned into categories. Then the categories become stereotypes. The stereotypes become suspicion. Suspicion becomes fear. And eventually people start believing that harm against the other is somehow justified.

Interfaith work can intervene very early in that process.

If communities already know one another, if religious leaders have each other’s telephone numbers, if young people have worked together, if relationships of trust exist before a crisis begins, the social fabric reacts differently when someone attempts to divide people.

And there is another responsibility which I consider fundamental: defending freedom of religion or belief consistently.

You cannot defend religious freedom only for religions you understand, admire or consider respectable. The real test comes when the beliefs concerned are unfamiliar, or even disturbing to you.

For me, defending the dignity and freedom of the other is not an optional part of interfaith work. It is one of its foundations.

JS: URI is unusual in that much of its work is carried out through hundreds of local Cooperation Circles rather than from a centralized international headquarters. What have you learned from these grassroots communities about peacebuilding that governments and large international institutions often fail to understand?

ER: Perhaps the biggest lesson is that peace is much more local than we sometimes imagine.

International institutions naturally think in terms of governments, resolutions, programmes and large organizations. These are necessary. But the extent of human relationships do not exist so much at that level.

They exist in neighbourhoods, schools, families, places of worship and villages. They exist between people who see each other every week.

A peace agreement may be signed in a capital city, but reconciliation does not happen in a conference room. It happens when people decide that they can live together again.

Our Cooperation Circles understand things that outsiders sometimes cannot see. They know which words will reopen an old wound. They know who can speak to whom. They know which religious leader people will listen to and which one they will not. They understand the history, the emotions and the relationships behind a conflict.

This kind of knowledge is almost impossible to import.

I think large institutions sometimes make the mistake of looking at grassroots organizations only as the people who implement programmes designed elsewhere, without consultation.

I see it almost the other way around. Very often, the grassroots should be telling the institutions what actually works. And then a back and forth can start until something effective is developed.

One of URI’s great strengths is precisely that it does not try to reproduce one model everywhere. The solutions developed in Nigeria will not necessarily be those developed in India, Bosnia, Argentina or the United States.

JS: After several years at the head of a global interfaith organization, has your experience changed your own understanding of religion—and of what it means to live alongside people whose beliefs may be radically different from your own?

ER: Very much so.

I came into interfaith work as someone with strong religious convictions, and I still have strong religious convictions. Interfaith engagement has not made me less committed to my own religion, which as you know, is Scientology.

What it has done is make me much more interested in the extraordinary ways human beings search for meaning, transcendence and a better life.

When you spend enough time with people of very different religions and worldviews, you discover something interesting. You can disagree profoundly about God, revelation, the nature of the human being, life after death or the purpose of existence — and still recognize in one another courage, generosity, wisdom and goodness.

That realization is not relativism.

Interfaith cooperation does not require me to believe that every religion says the same thing. They obviously do not. And I think pretending that they do actually impoverishes religion.

The challenge is more interesting than that: can I remain fully myself while allowing you to be fully yourself, and can we still build something together?

I believe we can.

And I would go even further. After years of doing this work, I think encounters across religious and cultural boundaries can make people happier.

They enlarge your world.

You acquire friendships you would never otherwise have had. You discover ways of thinking that force you to examine your own assumptions. Sometimes you find unexpected similarities; sometimes the differences remain enormous. But even those differences can become fascinating rather than threatening.

Perhaps this is ultimately what URI has taught me most deeply: peace does not require humanity to become uniform.

We do not need fewer identities.

We need to learn how to live with the richness of having many of them.