"Conflicts are driven by a number of complicated factors, but are often mislabeled as religious. This experience showed me that religious literacy is necessary in peacebuilding to appropriately address the ambivalent and complex religious dimensions of conflict, and how best to channel the power of religious peacebuilders in the creation of just and peaceful societies."—Ailih Weeldreyer, MTS candidate
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Going into her second year in the Master of Theological Studies program at Harvard Divinity School, Ailih Weeldreyer is no stranger to peacebuilding. She graduated from Kalamazoo College majoring in political science and promptly jumped into a period of activism and advocacy. During this time, Weeldreyer realized that her personal faith in Christianity and her passion for international relations are highly intertwined.
Through the Presbyterian Church USA, she worked in Washington, D.C., serving the unhoused population and advocating in Congress for improved housing policies, all while working for an organization that specializes in racial justice training for young professionals. These programs instilled in Weeldreyer a confidence in her ability to advocate, and she took these skills with her as she began tackling a new frontier: climate change.
The Sunrise Movement is a youth movement that faces the climate disaster, and Weeldreyer transitioned into the role of Hub Coordinator for her local branch of the organization.
“Like many young people, I started to realize that the climate emergency was one of the biggest things that encompasses intersections of everything: capitalism, racial justice, pretty much any issue you can think of today,” said Weeldreyer. “Organizing with the Sunrise Movement gave me a sense of agency because the climate emergency can be very daunting, and it was also a great time to use all the skills I learned in my year of service.”
Weeldreyer’s hands-on experience in the political realm and trenches of injustice led her to see firsthand what faith can look like as a powerful force in the world, whereas she had previously only explored this idea in the theoretical sense. As her passion in this intersection grew, she arrived at Harvard Divinity School. Courses such as “Religion and Global Governance” and “Negotiating across Worldviews” helped Weeldreyer both interpret her past experiences and prepare for future application. Through the HDS Religion and Public Life program, Weeldreyer is pursuing the Certificate in Religion and Public Life (CRPL) with a focus on religious literacy and humanitarian action. For her CRPL internship , she spent this past summer interning with the United States Institute of Peace.
“The experience was essentially putting into practice everything that I have learned at HDS so far and using all the knowledge I had in undergrad about geopolitics, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, as well as general American politics, and applying it all to the work of peacebuilding. I got to see how the degree that I’m working toward will actually be able to have an impact,” said Weeldreyer.
While working with USIP’s Religion and Inclusive Societies team, which is led by HDS alum Palwasha Kakar, MTS ‘04, Weeldreyer performed numerous research tasks, such as examing the effects of China’s religious diplomacy in their economic and political plans. She also supported the Gender Policy and Strategy team through research and organizing.
Weeldreyer’s independent research project that she completed toward the end of her internship outlined peacebuilding efforts on the Korean Peninsula with specific attention to how religious actors influenced these efforts. According to her findings, the closest that the peninsula ever came to reaching a peace agreement was in the 1990s, during a period of productive dialogue at the state level as well as civilian exchanges between Christians from South Korea and the Korean Christian Federation from North Korea.
Not only were these independent religious actors able to create positive change, but Weeldreyer also saw plenty of examples of global conflicts misleadingly labeled as religiously motivated, such as the ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur, India.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about these conflicts in terms of religious literacy. People who don’t fully understand the roots of the conflict just see it as religion. ‘We can just identify it as Christians and Hindus fighting each other, and people will understand.’ But that’s not the case, it’s just how the media tends to present things,” said Weeldreyer.
As Weeldreyer uncovered this discrepancy between media portrayal and the lived reality of the ethnic dispute, religious literacy emerged as the missing link. Understanding religious identities and relations is crucial to effectively pursuing peacebuilding efforts. These research projects drew heavily upon the lessons Weeldreyer learned in the first year of her master’s degree. At the root of each case she encountered, she harkened back to the central values of her “Negotiating across Worldviews” class with Dr. Jeffrey R. Seul.
“I have deep values, deep convictions,” said Weeldreyer. “If I see someone making a choice that I believe is unethical, like choosing money over people, I wonder: Why do they make that choice that is deeply offensive to my own values and beliefs? I could just scream at them from my own moral convictions, but they’re people. They have moral convictions, too. So why are they making those choices and what can I do? How can I talk to them from their perspective in a way that can actually make progress to create a better world?”
Answering these questions will be a continuous goal of Weeldreyer through the rest of her time at HDS and throughout her career, hopefully leading to further engagement with U.S. foreign policy at the systemic level and advocating for foreign policy that is increasingly ethical.
In the meantime, Weeldreyer looks forward to utilizing the expansive resources through both Harvard Divinity School and the courses it makes available across the Harvard graduate schools in order to continue exploring religious literacy in environments that may not typically involve such work.
—by Cecily Powell Tolleson, HDS news correspondent