33 Moments In 2016 That Proved Religion Can Be A Force For Good

Almost 500 years after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany, the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S. approved a declaration in August recognizing “there are no longer church-dividing issues” on many points with the Roman Catholic Church. The historic decision brought two formerly alienated churches together just in time for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

A group of Sikh motorcycle enthusiasts in British Columbia, Canada, hit the road in July to raise money for pediatric cancer awareness. Two weeks and more than 7,000 miles later, the B.C.-based Sikh Motorcycle Club had raised over $60,000 on behalf of the Canadian Cancer Society.

“We had some thunderstorms, and it started hailing... But then we thought about those kids that are in need, that need that money and so that gave us energy and we kept fighting through it,” rider Charnjit Dhadda told CTV News Vancouver.

New York City native Dalilah Muhammad took home a gold medal at the Rio Olympics in August, becoming the first American woman to win gold in the 400-meter hurdles. As she headed to Rio, Muhammad's parents credited the athlete's Muslim faith for giving her the drive needed to make it all way to the Olympics. "A lot of people don't realize how much work that goes into producing an Olympic athlete," Askia Muhammad told NY1 in August.

African Methodist Episcopal Church leaders took a stand against climate change in July and urged their congregations and communities to do the same. Some 30,000 AME clergy, leaders and members passed a resolution to support the historic 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. “Damage to our climate puts the health of children, elderly, and those with chronic illnesses at greater risk and disproportionately impacts African Americans,” Bishop John White, president of the AME Church’s Council of Bishops, said in a statement.

Slam poetry quartet Muslim Girls Making Change, participated in the international youth poetry festival Brave New Voices in July. Teens Kiran Waqar, Balkisa Abdikadir, Hawa Adam and Lena Ginawi spread awareness about their faith and the perils of Islamophobia through the art of poetry.

“Whenever you hear the word terrorism I don’t want the first thing you think about is Islam, because Islam, to me, is a religion of peace,” Ginawi told the Associated Press. “Anything that these terrorists do has nothing to do with Islam.”

Amid frightening, almost daily reports of anti-Muslim attacks and rhetoric in 2016, California’s State Assembly took a strong stand against a rising climate of Islamophobia in America. In August, the Assembly passed a resolution that declared August 2016 as Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month, as part of an effort to acknowledge the “myriad invaluable contributions of Muslim Americans in California and across the country.”

“During these difficult times of increased anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate incidents, [the] resolution and recognition of Muslim Americans is uplifting for our community and immensely appreciated,” said Basim Elkarra, Sacramento Valley Executive Director of the advocacy organization Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is truly a historic moment for all Californians.”

In a country where Muslim women have been fired and rejected from college for wearing a hijab, it was refreshing to see New York Fashion Week embrace the religious article. Muslim Indonesian designer Anniesa Hasibuan made history in September with a dazzling show featuring hijabs accompanying all 48 outfits. As the show ended, she received a standing ovation from a largely non-Muslim audience.

Over the months of demonstrations at the Sacred Stone Camp in North Dakota, progressive Christianreligiousdenominations, as well as the Jewish Voice for Peace, demonstrated their solidarity with this movement. And in October, a coalition of Muslim organizations spearheaded by the activist groups Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, MPower Change, and by indigenous converts to Islam raised over $12,000 online to support the Sacred Stone Camp.

More than 500 interfaith clergy members also hosted an important ceremony during which they burned copies of the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of religious documents from the 15th century that justified the colonization of the Americas and the oppression of its native people.

And just hours before the December victory at Standing Rock, hundreds of interfaith clergy and lay activists gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to pray for the earth.

A new council of prominent American Muslims and Jews announced its formation in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s win in November. Spearheaded by advocacy organizations the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council brought together two often alienated groups. The council plans to draft policy agendas to submit to Congress to ensure the rights and protections of minority religious groups.

A Sikh community in New Jersey came together over the weekend before Thanksgiving in an attempt to feed more than 13,000 people in need of a free meal. Over 500 volunteers from Jersey City’s Nanak Naam Jahaj Gurudwara cooked and delivered vegetarian meals to approximately 80 locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, including churches, shelters, and a correction center.

Sharing food is an integral part of the Sikh religious tradition. Every gurdwara, or Sikh temple, is supposed to have a langar, or kitchen, that is free and open to all people. “[The langar] is designed to uphold the principle of equality between all people of the world regardless of religion, caste, color, creed, age, gender or social status; to eliminate extreme poverty in the world and to bring about the birth of ‘caring communities,’” Onkar Singh, the main organizer for the “Let’s Share A Meal” event, told HuffPost.

In the face of rising Islamophobia and intolerance of Muslim Americans, activist Rana Abdelhamid raised awareness about Islam and humanized Muslim women with her beautiful photo series "Hijabis of New York." She started the series as a Tumblr and Facebook page in October 2014 and kept it running through 2015 and 2016, showcasing the diversity of Muslim women who wear hijabs in New York. “There’s something to it when [Muslim women are] leading our own empowerment movement,” Abdelhamid told HuffPost.

Pope Francis had several critical meetings with leaders of different religious groups, demonstrating his commitment to interfaith work. In February, he met with Patriarch Kirill, head of the largest branch of the Eastern Orthodox church, indicating a symbolic step towards healing a nearly 1,000-year-old schism within Christianity. Several months later he sat down with the grand imam of Egypt’s highest Islamic authority, Al-Azhar, in an attempt to heal Vatican relations with Sunni Muslim leaders after a five-year freeze in dialogue. Then in October, Francis received some one thousand pilgrims in the Vatican – most of them German Lutherans – as part of ecumenical preparations for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

Religion professors from Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School and Wellesley College launched a free, online series on world religions open to the masses in February. The courses were offered via an online learning platform called edX, and dove into Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism. Nearly 140,000 people signed up for the courses, said Diane Moore, director of Harvard Divinity School’s Religious Literacy Project and one of the professors behind the initiative.

"The course exceeded our expectations in terms of both numbers and the quality of learning that was represented in evaluations," Moore told HuffPost.

Norway’s Lutheran Church voted in April in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, joining a small but growing number of churches worldwide to do so. In a vote at the annual conference of the Norwegian Lutheran Church, 88 delegates out of 115 in total backed same-sex marriage.

“Finally we can celebrate love independently of whom one falls in love with,” said Gard Sandaker-Nilsen, leader of the Open Public Church, a religious movement within the church that had campaigned to change the rules.

Hundreds of American Muslims around the country joined forces to put their faith into action for the first National Muslim Soup Kitchen Day in May. More than 20 teams from mosques, Muslim student clubs, and faith-based non-profits signed up to serve in soup kitchens across the country. The volunteers cooked and distributed more than 3,000 meals throughout the day in New York, Florida, Alabama, and seven other states, according to the Muslim Soup Kitchen Project (MSKP), the New York-based organization that coordinated the national event.

At a time when more Islamophobic rhetoric and hate crimes seem to pop up every month, organizer Uzma Popal said that she hoped the national service day would help create unity. “It was just beautiful seeing everybody come together," she told HuffPost.

One week after more than 100 United Methodist clergy collectively came out as LGBT, hundreds of their colleagues called for the church to end discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation in May. “We, the undersigned clergy of The United Methodist Church, believe it is time: time for us to end the practice of requiring LGBTQI clergy and clergy candidates to hide their most authentic selves,” stated the open letter to the church, composed by the Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, the Rev. Gil Caldwell, and the Rev. Frank Schaefer, and released by Reconciling Ministries Network. In just one week, the letter had garnered 1,592 signatures from clergy members.

During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in June and July, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, breaking their fast every evening with the ritual iftar meal. This year, congregations and religious leaders organized interfaith iftars to bring people of different faiths together to observe the important Islamic custom.

The Council of American-Islamic Relations released its annual “Sharing Ramadan Resource Guide“ in the days before Ramadan, providing everything down to the press release for mosques across the U.S. to successfully plan and host an interfaith iftar. “We hope that just about every local community will have some type of event,” Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s communications director, told HuffPost.

The Rabbinical Assembly, which encompasses an international association of Conservative rabbis, passed a powerful resolution in June affirming the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming people. “Our Torah asserts that all humanity is created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s Divine Image,” the rabbi’s resolution stated.

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, senior rabbi of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. who came out as gay in 2014, said in an interview with LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign: “I hope this resolution will go far in promoting this deep truth of our religion in our society and in the world.”

John McCane and his partner, Salaphaty Rao, lived on opposite sides of the world — McCane in Peebles, Ohio, and Rao in Melbourne, Australia. But against innumerable odds, faith (and Facebook) brought these two soulmates together. Earlier this year, they got to celebrate their remarkable love story in a deeply meaningful way — with big, beautiful Hindu engagement ceremony.

“His family was completely involved and supportive, from grandparents in their 80s and 70s, to middle-aged families, everyone, because they have an absolute love for him,” McCane told HuffPost.

In the wake of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, LGBT and Muslim groups came together in June with the message that “love is stronger than hate.” Sixty-eight groups and two national leaders, including GLAAD, Muslim Public Affairs Council and The Trevor Project, signed the “Muslim-LGBTQ Unity Statement in Response to Divisive Rhetoric After Orlando Shooting.” The statement urged people of all faiths and backgrounds to stand together in a time of hate. “In standing together, hand in hand, across every faith, we send a powerful message to those who seek to divide us using hatred and violence: Love is stronger than hate and hope will defeat fear,” the statement read.

When a Michigan Unitarian Universalist congregation found itself homeless in June, a local mosque came to the rescue and offered them a space free of charge. “This has been the Muslim tradition for over 1,400 years — to be hospitable, to take care of your guest,” Imam Sohail Chaudhry of The Islamic Center of East Lansing told HuffPost.

The church's building was under construction for several months, but it was conveniently able to use the mosque's space for Sunday services as Muslim prayers take place on Fridays.

Muslims gathered for Catholic Mass in churches and cathedrals across France in July in a powerful display of unity following the killing of an elderly priest. Dozens of Muslims attended Mass in Rouen, a few miles from the church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray where two French teenagers slit the throat of 85-year-old Rev. Jacques Hamel after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State militant group. One of the nuns who was taken hostage during the attack embraced the Muslim attendees after the service, The Associated Press reported.

“We are very moved by the presence of our Muslim friends and I believe it is a courageous act that they did by coming to us,” Dominique Lebrun, the archbishop of Rouen, said after the Mass.

Sixteen-year-old amateur boxer Amaiya Zafar has never gotten the chance to fight in an official competition. She’s a Muslim who wears a hijab and covers her arms and legs while fighting ― which isn’t approved by international boxing regulations ― so she’s usually banned from the ring before her matches even begin. But when Zafar and her family arrived at the Sugar Bert Boxing National Championships in Kissimmee, Fla. in November, her opponent came to her defense. When Zafar was disqualified, her potential opponent, Aliyah Charbonier, decided to put solidarity before victory, telling Zafar that she would share the winner’s belt.

In the months leading up to 2015's Earth Day, a group of roughly 50 pagans gathered in a closed Facebook group to draft a collective call to action. On April 22, 2015, they published the “Pagan Community Statement on the Environment,” which framed climate change as a global moral dilemma to which pagans and other people of faith must respond. By 2016's Earth Day, the statement had garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.

“If there is any issue on which we Pagans should be able to speak harmoniously, it is in response to the desecration of the Earth," John Halstead, founder of the statement’s working group, told HuffPost in April. "I hope that this helps demonstrate to the interfaith activist community that Pagans are serious and worthy partners in the fight to turn the tide of global climate change."

More than 200 women entered the inner sanctum of Mumbai’s historic Haji Ali Dargah mosque in November after trustees at the site lifted a ban on female visitors. The tomb houses the remains of Islamic saint Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari and had been off-limits to women for several years. Following a drawn out legal battle, the mosque finally lifted its ban.

“We are very happy the ban against women’s entry into the shrine was lifted,” activist Noorjehan Safia Niaz told The Guardian. “Credit must be given where due, and the trustees ensured our visit to the inner sanctum of the mosque was peaceful … We even had chai with them after the visit.”

After a year filled with Islamophobia and anti-Muslim acts, it was heartening to see a campaign with a very different mission. Messages of love, compassion and support turned up on the sidewalk of a mosque in Virginia in November. Members of the Mubarak Mosque in Chantilly, Virginia were delighted to read, “You are loved,” “We are your brothers and sisters” and “We are with you” written in sidewalk chalk on the paths leading up to the building.

“We believe it was someone in our neighboring community,” said Tariq Amjed, president of the Central Virginia Chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, who first discovered the messages. “We have been here for about four or five years now and we have a beautiful community of people around us. This proves it once more, and we hope they come visit our mosque.”