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An interfaith online discussion, held as the UN General Assembly's high-level week wound down, brought together religious leaders, scholars, and youth advocates to discuss how faith communities can advance nuclear disarmament.
Recognising the basic tenet to protect life that runs through most of the world religions, the panel also brought to the forefront a number of ways to encourage religious leaders and faith communities to engage in efforts supporting nuclear disarmament. Speakers stressed resilience, persistence, and moral authority as qualities that let people of faith overcome divisions and find cooperation.
Ela Gandhi explains that, as a Hindu from the Gandhian tradition, she holds a belief in universal religion, and she offers three reasons for opposing nuclear proliferation. First, a true devotee understands the pain of others, and the lasting suffering of Hiroshima's survivors and of people near nuclear test sites makes inflicting such pain contrary to her faith. Second, every human being carries some divinity, much as other traditions speak of being made in God's image, so harming people is a sin against God's creation. Third, Hinduism calls for respect for people and for Mother Nature, and nuclear weapons, which are far more powerful today than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, threaten to destroy the earth itself. She concludes that everyone must do all they can to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and religious communities hold great power if united.
Kolade Fadahunsi grounds his opposition to nuclear weapons in Christian moral teaching. As a Methodist, he points to the sixth commandment, "you shall not kill," and argues that because nuclear weapons are built to kill people on a massive scale, believers are obliged to speak out against anything that contributes to human death. Working across a number of different humanitarian disarmament campaigns, he described the resilience and persistence necessary to build across global divides, and know that it can take time to achieve results. Kolade recalled John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and Wesley's well-known call to do all the good one can, to all the people one can, at every time one can.
Emi Kuroda, a Buddhist advocate from Soka Gakkai International, argued that movements grow through human hearts and one-on-one dialogue, and that youth voices must be made visible. She cited a survey of young people in five nuclear-affected countries showing that personal testimony deepens support for abolition, and noted that in an era of AI-generated images, lived experience carries real emotional weight. Her own experiences meeting Hibakusha shaped her activism. She also spoke of her Buddhist practice as a "community of encouragement" that helps young activists avoid burnout, quoting Soka Gakkai International founder Daisaku Ikeda's view that peace is a contest between despair and hope.
Jacques Linder, a scholar of Catholic social teaching at the College of the Holy Cross, then addressed nuclear deterrence and just war theory. He explained that Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical on artificial intelligence, calls the just war framework outdated and points instead to dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. He traced the shift in teaching from the U.S. bishops' 1983 pastoral letter, which conditionally accepted deterrence as a step toward abolition, to Pope Francis's 2017 condemnation of nuclear weapon possession. He pointed to grassroots efforts such as the Plowshares activists and the Nevada Desert Experience’s annual Holy Week Walk as examples of faith efforts to shift towards a lasting peace. Jacques urged elite and grassroots Catholic voices to keep talking to each other, while centering survivors and downwinders.
Siam Tooran at Religions for Peace, offered three roles for religious leaders: keeping human beings at the center of security debates rather than letting casualties become statistics, challenging the idea that one nation can be secure at another's expense, and rebuilding the trust multilateralism depends on. He warned that the expiration of New START leaves no binding limits on U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals for the first time in about fifty years, and urged religious communities to keep channels open between adversaries and resist the fatalism that treats nuclear weapons as permanent.
The session was organized by a coalition that included Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, the Gandhi Development Trust, the World Methodist Council, the Baha'i International Community, the United Church of Christ, the American Friends Service Committee, Soka Gakkai International and ICAN.