This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Francis Younghusband spent his first career as a British imperial soldier and explorer, serving in the Indian Political Department, leading a controversial military expedition into Tibet, and rising to the presidency of the Royal Geographical Society. He built the World Congress of Faiths in a very different second career, one shaped by his own private mystical experiences on his travels, encounters he came to believe pointed toward a spiritual unity underlying the world's formally separate religions, a unity that ordinary institutional religion, in his view, obscured more often than it revealed.
Younghusband did not start from nothing. The Congress he founded in 1936 grew out of two earlier gatherings, a 1924 conference on the Religions of Empire held in London, and the second World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1933, which had itself revived, forty years on, the interfaith ambition of the original 1893 Parliament. Younghusband's own first World Congress of Faiths met in London from July 3 to 17, 1936, drawing figures who ranged well beyond his own Anglican Christian background, including the future Indian president and philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, gathered under a stated aim to instill a spirit of fellowship among people through religion while leaving every member free to keep following their own tradition.