The Religion & Forced Migration Initiative (RFMI) aims to better understand and respond to the role that religion plays in the lives of refugees as they resettle and integrate into the United States. We see this as a gap in our shared public, civic, and scholarly knowledge: that the religious and spiritual life of refugees and refugee communities is critical to understanding their experiences, and that their personal stories are a way for them to share and for everyone to learn about this issue. Most refugees identify as religious and represent the plurality of the world's religions and most resettlement agencies and service providers are faith-based, yet there has been limited research, documentation, and training about the interplay of religion and resettlement as well as understanding the diversity of refugee religion.

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Through our conferences, forums, and symposia it is clear that religion matters for refugees’ mental health, civic lives, and for fostering our shared civil society. RFMI is responding to this gap in order to strengthen refugee services and the resettlement structure at large, to assemble a supportive network of stakeholders and to do so by centralizing the voices of refugees in our current moment. We do so as a form of civic engagement, public scholarship, and public religion.

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RFMI emerged from an international interdisciplinary conference to respond to a singular human crisis of our time: the largest forced movement of people the world has faced since the Second World War. This project is co-sponsored by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration & Refugee Services and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.