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"The girl who led me to Christ in high school actually walked away from her faith in college," Meyer recounts. "She was the strongest Christian I knew, but once she left home and started becoming friends with Jews, Hindus, and Muslims, she had a crisis. She'd been told these people were going to hell, that they were the enemy. The only way she could reconcile her friendship and admiration for these people was by abandoning her faith and affirming that all religions are true."

Meyer and Patel believe there is another way. Somewhere between religious relativism and religious fundamentalism is a third option—what they call religious pluralism. This is the foundational principle of the seminary course.

"Religious pluralism is different than relativism," one student tells us. "Relativism says you cannot make exclusive truth claims, that everyone is right. Pluralism simply recognizes that we live in a very diverse culture; there are a lot of different religions. Pluralism means talking about how we can live together and still maintain our own religious identity. Truth claims are okay."

Meyer believes church leaders need to model and teach Christians how to cooperate with and befriend people of other faiths without abandoning their own convictions.

"If we don't," she says, "it will either mean more people will leave the church, or there will be more conflict between Christians and other groups." An African student in the class agrees.

"Where I come from, there is so much conflict," he says. "People are killing each other because of their beliefs. As a Christian, I am called to have compassion on the crowds, like Jesus did, and love my neighbor—even the neighbor I disagree with."

In our increasingly secular society, many people have come to view religion as a problem and the source of conflict between groups. This sentiment was popularized in John Lennon's 1971 song "Imagine," in which religion is presented as an obstacle to world peace and harmony. But Eboo Patel is helping these seminary students turn conventional wisdom upside down. He sees the potential for greater cooperation and coexistence by embracing our different religious identities, not abandoning them.

"If you enter a ministerial gathering as a Christian minister and downplay your Christian identity in an attempt to make everyone comfortable," says Patel, "as a Muslim leader, I'm immediately suspicious. I don't trust you. Embracing your identity as a Christian creates safety for me to be a Muslim." A student from a liberal denomination jumps in to affirm Patel's statement.

"In my experience, the hardest thing about interfaith dialogue is Christians who are afraid to talk about Jesus, and that's a tragedy" she says. "That's what I appreciate about evangelicals. They enter the room and they want to talk about Jesus. They're not afraid to own their identity and their narrative, and that gives freedom for everyone else to do the same."

"We have often viewed particularity and pluralism as mutually exclusive," says Patel. "We think that if you are one thing, you must be disrespectful of other things."

The message of embracing identity and acknowledging theological distinctions brought great comfort to some students in the class. Maria, a self-identified Pentecostal, was initially hesitant about taking Eboo Patel's class.

"I thought the class was a call to believe that all faiths lead to the same place," says Maria, "and I don't believe that." She went on to explain that her denomination is very intentional about not engaging in interfaith dialogue. But now she realizes how important, and how possible, interfaith cooperation is. "Can my church respect another person's identity? Yes. Can we have mutually encouraging relationships? I believe we can. Can we work together toward a common cause? I believe we can.

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