Young People, Globalization and Interfaith Advocacy

This article aims at understanding how, in a global era, young people have appropriated interreligious advocacy, through the study of the Interfaith Tour (IFT). This program, created in 2012 in France, aims to provide every two years four or five young people of different beliefs (atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish) with the opportunity to go a world tour, followed by a tour round France (to share the discoveries made during the trip with the French public). Most of IFT’s objectives overlap those of adult interreligious movements. The program seeks to convince that religious differences do not represent a threat, but a richness, and that they do not prevent people from cooperating for the common good. There are also more specific goals, such as the empowerment of youth, seen as an age group that is too often not well represented in the higher echelons of society and interreligious organizations. The originality of IFT’s advocacy lies in the means used, notably the intensive use of the resources of liberal globalization, even though the young people who participate in IFT have an ambivalent relationship with such liberal globalization.