Faith leaders never asked for a seat at the table. They built the table. That is a story I have told before, about a thread that runs through centuries of argument without breaking, because somebody has always been there to pick it back up, and it is a story I believe with everything I have.
But there is something I have not said.
The table is shaking.
Not wobbling the way tables do, the way every generation swears its moment is the worst one and every generation before it rolls its eyes. I mean shaking. The legs of the table, the shared understandings that hold up everything else: that a human being is a human being before they are a category, that the stranger is owed protection, that power answers to something above itself, have been shaken to the core. You can feel it in the wars that will not end and the ones waiting to begin. You can feel it in houses of worship that now plan for the unthinkable before they plan the holiday services. You can feel it in the way people talk about each other, not as neighbors who are wrong, but as enemies who are irredeemable.
I have spent my life around tables like this one. I helped convene a thousand religious leaders at the United Nations in the summer of 2000, when the century was new and it was still possible to believe the hardest work was behind us. I have sat with patriarchs and imams, with rabbis and swamis and monks, in rooms where the coffee went cold because nobody wanted to be the first to leave. And I can tell you what every carpenter already knows: when a table shakes, you do not stand back and study it. You do not form a committee to discuss the shaking. You put your hands on it. You get underneath it. You find the leg that’s failing and you hold it while somebody makes it fast.
The people who built this table are the only ones who can do that. Not because they are better than everyone else, but because they know where the joints are. They know what the table is for.
And there is something else they know how to do, something the world keeps forgetting it needs. Religious leaders are the most natural diplomats humanity has ever produced. Not because they seek a role in government; they don’t, and they shouldn’t. It is precisely because faith and state each have their own work that religious leaders are free to do what official envoys cannot: cross borders that are closed to flags, speak to hearts that no treaty reaches, sit with the grieving on both sides of a line that no negotiator can redraw. When statecraft stalls, and it is stalling everywhere, this is the missing link. Not a rival channel to diplomacy, but the channel beneath it: the one that keeps two people human to each other long enough for the diplomats to do their work. That is not politics. That is repair. And no one else is equipped to offer it.
Here is what I believe, and I will keep saying it in every way I know how: the power of religion is greater than any other power in the world. Greater than armies, because armies can compel the body but not the heart. Greater than markets, because markets can price everything except the things people will die for. Greater than any government, because governments come and go and faith buries them all. Billions of people wake up every morning and consult something older than any state before they consult anything else. That is power. And power on that scale comes with exactly one legitimate use: peace. Not power for territory, not power for grievance, not power for the humiliation of the other. Peace. Anyone who tells you their faith demands otherwise has misunderstood the faith, and that is a subject I will return to, because the problem, as a wise man once said, is often not with the faith but with the faithful.
But today the point is simpler. The table is shaking, and the builders are being called back.
On August 29, in New York City, the World Council of Religious Leaders will convene One World: One Humanity, a gathering of the world’s most respected faith leaders, from across fourteen traditions, for a single morning of plenary conversation and shared resolve. One morning. One room. Framed around the one thing every tradition at that table already agrees on: the dignity we hold in common, and the responsibility that follows from it.
I know what some will say, because I have heard it for twenty-five years. Another gathering. Another communiqué. What difference does a morning make? And I understand the fatigue behind the question. But I have also seen what happens when the right people are in the room at the right moment, and I have seen, more painfully, what happens when they are not. An empty chair is not neutral. An empty chair is a statement, and in a moment like this one, it is the wrong statement.
So this is the question I want to leave with every religious leader reading this, and with everyone who sits in their congregations and looks to them: not what will they do, the diplomats, the governments, the other traditions, the people whose job you have decided it is. The question is what can I do? Not as a sigh of helplessness. As the beginning of responsibility. And the first answer, the simplest one, the one that has to come before all the others, is this: come. Do not wait for others to arrive first. Solidarity that waits for company is not solidarity; it is spectating with good intentions. The table was not built by people who waited.
The thread and the table are the same story, one seen from above, a little frayed, still holding; one seen from underneath. The table has carried more weight than its builders ever imagined, through wars and partitions and centuries of argument, and it is still standing but it is shaking, and it will not steady itself.
The builders know what to do. They have always known.
Show up. Stand up. Speak up.
One World: One Humanity convenes August 29, 2026 in New York City, gathering eminent leaders from across the world’s faith traditions. Learn more at wcorl.org/oneworld.