When Adam Phillips was an undergraduate at Ohio State University, he found himself in between what felt like two separate worlds. Phillips, who is now the CEO of Interfaith America, was a leader in a conservative campus ministry. At the same time, he sang in the university’s Men’s Glee Club, a prestigious choir, where many of his friends happened to be gay and held more progressive views.
From inside of these two communities, he watched the culture wars unfold on campus. Heated debates over LGBTQ rights, abortion and climate change seemed to widen the divide between left- and right-leaning student groups. Phillips’ mind grasped for solutions — how to keep people talking, how to stay curious across disagreement.
“I think that’s part of my story as a bridge builder,” he told me in a recent Zoom interview.
Phillips, an ordained pastor who once planted and led an evangelical congregation, went on to channel his peacemaking instincts into projects that were activated and fueled by faith, including the Christian advocacy group Bread for the World and USAID’s faith-based office under the Biden-Harris administration. Over a year ago, Phillips took the role of the CEO of Interfaith America, the first one the organization has ever had.
Phillips’ leadership comes at a time when calls to bridge America’s divides feel both urgent and, often, futile. Some 80% of Americans say the country is deeply divided. Roughly a third believe it should be governed as a Christian nation. Although not the most religiously diverse in the world, among the nations of over 120,000 million people, America ranks as the most religiously diverse nation.
Against this backdrop, Phillips is up against one of the harder tasks in public life: figuring out what it would take to turn differences into a common cause, and how people of faith, across all traditions, could become a force behind this transformation.
‘Where can I be of use?’
In the 1920s, interfaith work in the United States was about strengthening what was often described as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” The metaphor of a “melting pot,” popularized by Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, “was meant to dramatize the elimination of intra-European prejudices in the great crucible of American democracy,” Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, wrote in this publication.
He described America at that time as “a crucible that melts away your conflicts and your hatreds.”
But today, as the country approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, the demographics have changed in America and the country needs a more expansive vision of what pluralism is and could be, Patel and Phillips have argued. The two biggest groups in the U.S. are Christians at 62% and the nonreligious, who make up 29%. Among the 7% percent are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu.
Patel’s metaphor for a more modern pluralism in America is one of a “potluck,” in which the country’s various cultures and religious traditions bring the very best to the communal feast.
“Potlucks are not uniform, boring affairs,” said Phillips. There are samosas, fried chicken alongside spicy dip and another kind of spicy dip.
“People are bringing the best in what they’re most proud of,” he said.
The question is, how to make sure that everyone has a seat at that table so that the array of dishes can turn into a feast?
When Phillips was in ninth grade, he began to wonder what lay beyond the quiet cul-de-sac of his San Diego neighborhood. To find out what that was, he started tagging along to church with any friend who would take him. He had friends from Hindu and Muslim faiths. He attended his Jewish friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs.
“I was beginning to be aware of a bigger world around me,” he told me.
In another formative moment, Phillips watched the Live Aid concert on MTV, a mass production held on July 13, 1985, to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. The idea of people of faith coalescing around a bigger need has become an appealing vision for Phillips.
“I think that led me on this journey to think: Well, where can I be of use?”
At Ohio State, Phillips studied international relations. But he was also involved with theater, took religion classes and minored in Japanese. He declared a journalism major for about three months. With his grandmother’s Bible on his dorm-room desk, Phillips decided to double down on his commitment to faith in college. So he joined a campus ministry, which he later found was “pretty fundamentalist,” he said. “They were cool, interesting people,” he recalled.
Eventually as a ministry leader and also a member of the gay-friendly men’s choir, he watched the culture wars grow more heated.
“I thought all these issues belonged and we needed one another to figure out solutions to some of these challenges,” he said.
His curiosity in other faiths was at times met with suspicion and even rebuke. After 9/11, Phillips began reading about Islam to better understand the faith’s story in America. He attended Friday prayers with a friend. But his Christian leaders at the time warned against studying the faith, even calling it “demonic.”
“I thought, this didn’t feel right to me,” Phillips said.
Still, he wanted to serve in his faith. One summer, while volunteering at a Christian camp, he got a strong impression that he should go to seminary, and maybe even become a pastor. He followed the nudge, and at 35 years old, planted and led an evangelical church in Portland, Oregon, for nearly a decade.
“I got to be in community with folks that often felt excluded from the church,” Phillips told me. But his efforts to unify invited backlash.
In 2015, Phillips and Christ Church, the congregation he planted in Oregon, made national headlines after its sponsor, the Evangelical Covenant Church, forced him out and withdrew funding. The decision came after Phillips publicly spoke out in favor of full inclusion of LGBTQ congregants in the life of the church.
“It was one of the hardest, most painful experiences I had had both professionally and personally,” Phillips recalled.
But looking back, the experience revealed unexpected grace.
“In the midst of real pain and division, a new belonging for me emerged and I can’t fathom my life, all these years later, without that season.”
Despite differing views with his congregants and leaders, Phillips noted, he still works with members of his former denomination on issues like hunger and poverty.
‘The real is not black or white’
But Phillips’ faith continued to move him to action.
Early in his career, he worked on HIV Aids in Africa at the ONE Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy organization started by Bono. There, he watched people of various faiths come together around a shared moral conviction: In a world of abundance, especially one with life-saving AIDS medications, no one should be forgotten or left behind.
He went to work for Bread for the World and the federal government at USAID, where he served as director of USAID’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships during the Biden-Harris administration.
During his first week on the job at Interfaith America, then as the chief strategy officer and chief of staff, Hamas extremists violently killed over 1,200 Israelis in a brutal massacre on Oct. 7. In the following months, Interfaith America leaned into its work with college campuses, business leaders and others to address antisemitism, Islamophobia and the ways in which it impacted common life here in the United States.
“We’ve got a lot of hard things going on in the country at the moment, a lot of division, but there is also some data that shows that we’re more alike and more united than ever,” Phillips said.
This work at Interfaith America spans across college campuses, but also in workplaces, health care spaces and Fortune 500 companies.
One such example takes place every summer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Catholic Charities of Santa Fe and the Latter-day Saints partner up to host a refugee summer camp for families from Arab, Afghan and African countries. The Latter-day Saints offer their chapel space, and volunteer by providing transportation and hosting workshops.
For Phillips, pluralism does not mean diluting the unique features and theological differences in favor of a bland consensus. In a way, it requires just the opposite — people being deeply rooted in their own traditions, their holidays and prayer traditions, and bringing that fullness into public life.
“If people are able to root down in the distinctiveness of their faith traditions and see that as a bridge to cooperate across differences, something really special can happen, something for the common good,” Phillips said.
Contemplative gaze
Most Sundays, Phillips is in the pews at All Saints Episcopal Church on the north side of Chicago with his wife and son. But he still sometimes thinks of himself as a pastor.
Faith and doubt have always existed side by side for Phillips.
When he felt that he was losing touch with God, he’s found comfort in contemplative tradition. His journey first began with a two-day retreat with Rev. Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan teacher who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation. Drawing on Rohr’s teachings, Phillip has tried to develop a “contemplative gaze,” an orientation toward news, work and family life with wonder and compassion instead of an urge to fix and categorize. He described it to me as taking a “long, loving look at the real.”
“And the real is not black and white,” he told me. “The real is shades of all colors, including gray.”
The contemplative tradition helped restore his faith back together.
He was moved by a thought by Thomas McConkie, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that resonated with him: Spiritual life always risks becoming performative rather than transformative.
I asked Phillips what the work of religious pluralism looks like amid the current administration’s efforts to instill Christian values in public life — from the Ten Commandments posters in classrooms to state-backed Bible literacy courses in public schools.
“I think it’s quite clear in our founding documents, even in the way that the revolutionary generation and the early generations of Americans set up the country, that we’re not a Christian nation in particular, but we’re a nation of many faiths,” he said.
He pointed to America’s long-standing commitment to religious liberty, rooted in the First Amendment but also in early colonial charters in Rhode Island and South Carolina. From the 1600s onward, the country encompassed a wide range of Christian traditions: Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Unitarians. But Jews, Muslims and Indigenous spiritual communities were part of the American story from the beginning as well.
‘Divine spark’
So how should a person of faith, and Christians in particular, live out their beliefs in public life? Phillips said he tries to do so every day, but that doesn’t always mean invoking Jesus or inviting someone to church.
“It might just be me living out who I am and my identity,” he said.
What it means to be an American and a person of faith has always evolved, and the question feels especially alive as the country approaches its 250th anniversary.
“We have to ask ourselves what parts of our living yet ancient traditions are inviting us anew to help build the next 250 years of this country?” Phillips said.
He looks up to leaders like Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has championed efforts to “disagree better,” and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew who draws openly on his faith in public service. Their religious commitments may not always be overt, Phillips says, but they shape how each man approaches democracy and his sense of civic responsibility toward those in need.
In a country as diverse as the United States, conflict is inevitable, Phillips acknowledged. But pluralism offers a way to stay rooted in the ideal of “e pluribus unum,” the vision of a unity and shared purpose without erasing real differences.
Or as Danielle Allen, a Harvard University political scientist, put it, “out of many a new whole.”
“So how do we seek a new wholeness?” Phillips said. “That sounds like a big idea, and maybe an impossible idea.”
Still, Phillips is hopeful. Each tradition brings a kind of “divine spark” to the table, he said, and these distinct sparks can inspire each religion to celebrate each other, together. Phillips’ goal is to harness those differences toward shared work on problems that touch everyone: housing, hunger, neighborhood service, campus conflict.
“People come to work in cubicles from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, all these various identities,” he said. “How do we not see these as ways to divide, but root down and see our faith and our identities as a bridge for a greater good?”