By JoAnne Wadsworth, Communications Consultant, G20 Interfaith Forum
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The following is drawn from an episode of the G20 Interfaith Forum Podcast, in which hosts Stuart Bird and Marianna Richardson sat down with Daffa Raynanda—a Southeast Asian narrative strategist working at the intersection of sustainability, communication, and inter-civilizational diplomacy—to explore the role of Abrahamic values in bridging interreligious divides across Southeast Asia and beyond. The full episode is available to watch on YouTube.
In a world increasingly defined by polarization and fragmentation, Daffa Raynanda is doing something quietly radical: using stories to change the world.
Teodisi and the Abrahamic Vision
Raynanda is the co-founder and managing director of Teodisi, a platform he founded alongside several colleagues to explore social, political, and cultural issues through an Abrahamic lens. With more than four million engagements across Southeast Asia—where shared linguistic roots across Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore have helped the platform grow—Teodisi has become a meaningful hub for interfaith reflection in the region. In his conversation with the G20 Interfaith Forum Podcast, Raynanda described the animating purpose of his work: not to preach, but to examine how Abrahamic values—centered on responsibility, justice, and the preservation of life—show up in today’s world, and to bring those values into sharper focus in public discourse.
“What I see emerging is a shared awareness that we are not just preserving tradition, but actually holding a common moral inheritance.”
That conviction is rooted in lived experience. Growing up in Makassar, Indonesia, Raynanda has seen firsthand the realities of climate change—flooding, shifting ecosystems, policy failures. His work in green transformation is driven by a principle he offered to his podcast hosts: “Think globally, act locally.” For Raynanda, the sustainability crisis and the interreligious crisis are not unrelated. Both require a recovery of shared ethical purpose.
In 2022, Raynanda served as a policy researcher in Indonesia’s T20 (Think20) task force—the official ideas bank of the G20, during Indonesia’s presidency. Working in the area of digital governance, cybersecurity, and inclusive connectivity, he helped develop policy around digital safety for youth and responsible digital ecosystems. His experience in that process reinforced a broader conviction: that the conversations taking place in elite global spaces like the G20 have the potential to shape how entire societies respond to emerging challenges, but only if those ideas can be understood and adopted at the grassroots level. “Ideally,” he observed, “these ideas could actually breathe at the grassroots level, be understood, adapted, and lived by communities.”
When Religion Becomes an Identity Marker
The IF20’s 2025 policy focus area on addressing interreligious tensions through education gave Raynanda’s hosts a natural opportunity to probe one of his central concerns. When asked what drives interreligious tension, his answer was striking in its precision: the problem, he argued, is not that people believe different things. The problem is that religion, in many contexts, has ceased to function as a space for ethical reflection and has instead become an identity marker—something that defines “who I am” and, perhaps more dangerously, “who I am not.”
“Religion becomes something inherited but not deeply understood, and when something is inherited without understanding, it can be defended fiercely but not necessarily reflected upon.”
Raynanda drew a careful distinction between the essence of religion—its orientation toward God, truth, and moral responsibility—and its expression, which naturally differs across communities shaped by different histories, languages, and institutions. Interreligious tension, he argued, tends to arise not from genuine theological difference but from over-attachment to expression at the expense of essence. When that happens, religion becomes something to defend rather than something that transforms.
His prescription is education—but not merely the accumulation of religious knowledge. What is needed, he said, is the cultivation of genuine understanding: the ability to sit with difference, ask questions, and engage across divides without turning them into oppositions. He pointed to a historical irony: the earliest universities were rooted in religious spaces—the mosque, the cathedral—and yet today, religious education is often undervalued in formal settings. Reconnecting learning to ethical depth, he argued, is essential.
Raynanda also emphasized the family as the first and most foundational site of religious formation.
“Education didn’t start in institutions. It starts from the family. The first place we learn how to see others—with respect, with fear, or with openness—is at home.”
He sees the erosion of that foundation in many societies as directly connected to the difficulty people face in engaging with difference later in life.
Keturah and the Traveling Values
Near the close of the conversation, Raynanda shared a perspective from his research that surprised even his interviewers: a reflection on Keturah, the third wife of Abraham, who is described in the biblical text as being sent to the east. Raynanda interprets this not only geographically—pointing out that the east of the ancient MENA world aligns with what is today Southeast Asia—but symbolically. Keturah, he suggested, represents how Abrahamic values can travel, adapt, and embed themselves in diverse cultures without always being formalized as doctrine. It is a lens through which he reads Southeast Asia itself: a region of extraordinary diversity that has nonetheless cultivated deep instincts toward harmony, hospitality, and the preservation of relationship—values he sees as resonant with the moral inheritance of the Abrahamic tradition.
“When we bring Abrahamic narrative into interfaith space, the goal is not to make everyone agree. It is to introduce a sense of inheritance—that we are part of a broader moral story, even as we express it differently.”
That, in essence, is the vision driving Teodisi, and Daffa Raynanda’s broader work: not erasing difference, but recovering the shared responsibility that lies beneath it.
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Daffa Raynanda is the co-founder and managing director of Teodisi, a platform that uses narratives centered on Abrahamic values to empower religions and youth to overcome interreligious tensions. A Southeast Asian narrative strategist working at the intersection of sustainability, communication, and inter-civilizational diplomacy, he designs education systems and institutional strategies connecting Southeast Asia’s innovation in green transformation to broader global conversations. In 2022, he served as a policy researcher in Indonesia’s T20 task force during the country’s G20 presidency, focusing on digital governance, cybersecurity, and inclusive connectivity. He has done extensive work building bridges of understanding between religions and differing groups across the Southeast Asian region and beyond.
JoAnne Wadsworth is a Communications Consultant for the G20 Interfaith Forum Association and Editor of the Viewpoints Blog.