Intellectual Responses To Religious Pluralism

Introduction

Pluralism is in vogue.  As the Bangladeshi newspaperDainik Janakantha editorialized in June 5th, 2001, “…it is the age of achieving freedom. It is the age of singing songs of triumph of pluralism over authoritarianism.  It is the age of exception, the age of difference, and the age of proclaiming the victory of mankind and diversifying the sources of creativity.”[^1]   Unfortunately, the current daunting reality does not endorse such a positive outlook.   As I write, news has just come in of another suicide bombing in Iraq that killed two hundred people, leaving countless lives devastated, and further reducing any remaining element of trust in the country.  How are Iraqis to reconcile their own internal religious differences while dealing both with military intervention by a foreign power and a civil conflict?  It seems that hopes for a pluralistic religious society in Iraq are fading away. Across the world, the paradigm of hope has been replaced by many sentiments of pessimism.  With today’s challenges, is there a hope for the survival of religious pluralism?

InThe Clash of Civilizations , Samuel Huntington states that the dominant characteristic of the post-Cold War global environment is violence between different ethnic and religious groups.  In his thesis, Huntington argues that the primary axis of conflict in the future would be along cultural and religious lines.  Many disagree with Huntington’s thesis that the world’s traditions are inherently and inevitably in conflict with each other. However, the daily news headlines make it clear that far too much violence in our world is related to religious differences.  On September 11th, 2001, the world witnessed a vicious attack on human civilization.  The attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. struck at symbols of American prosperity and power.  In turn, many people in America have identified the enemy as another symbol - a monolithic Islam diametrically opposed to the democratic West.  As a result, many people believe that Huntington’s thesis has become a true prophecy manifested in the clash of religions between Christianity and Islam.   In response to the September 11th terrorist attacks, Europe, America and many other countries enacted anti-terror laws (i.e. the USA PATRIOT Act) that have made many Muslim men and women in these countries feel that they are viewed with apprehension and even serious suspicion. These sad realities question the validity of the discourse of religious pluralism and indicate that there are very real, serious dangers to the development of religious pluralism.  In fact, the whole notion of religious pluralism is in turmoil.

The political philosopher Michael Walzer wrote that the challenge of a multicultural society is to embrace its diversity while maintaining a common life.  This suggests the need for all communities within a diverse society to take responsibility for embracing a shared life while maintaining their uniqueness.[^2]   For Walzer, it is this dynamic that leads to the ideal pluralist society as a “community of communities.” Otherwise, a chasm of ignorance between different religious communities can too easily be filled by bigotry, often turning into violence and hatred.  However, the question remains: How can we have a common life while maintaining our uniqueness in a changing world?  Once again, the hopeful visions for the “ triumph of

pluralism” and the “common life” seem very utopian at a time of great crisis in our world.  Today, the world faces the ‘War on Terror’ and global militarization.  Sadly, waves of local as well as global violence have overtaken the pillars of religious pluralism and threaten to escalate beyond all control.  The tragic, unpredictable events in many regions cast their shadows over collective efforts to live in a pluralistic and peaceful world.

However, it is precisely during such times of adversity, ideological fundamentalism and absolutist exclusivity, that the world is most in need of voices and forces of sanity, reason, and moral responsibility - the genuine building blocks of religious pluralism.  As we witness attempts at imposing a simplistic view of a Manichean universe, polarization, and reductively stereotyping good and evil, we are most in need of those who will engage in a redemptive validation of pluralism, tolerance, diversity, authenticity of identity, and a comprehensive engagement in collective responsibility.  The increasing reality of interaction between cultures and religious traditions makes religious pluralism not only impossible to ignore, but an obligatory task for human empowerment and change.  Religious pluralism seeks to give a voice and an audience to the silenced as well as grant a sense of legitimacy to the excluded.

Religious groups tend not to ask themselves why the “other” thinks of them the way that they do.  At the 2003 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Atlanta, sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow was asked how he thought faith communities were adapting to religious pluralism in close quarters.  He used the metaphor of an elevator: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and the rest of world’s religions are all riding it together.  They are increasingly aware of the other people around them, but they are doing just about everything they can to avoid a real interaction.  To deal with the reality inside this “world-elevator,” Diana Eck founded the “Pluralism Project” at Harvard University in 1991 in order to study and document the growing religious diversity of the United States, with a special view to its new immigrant religious communities.  Eck suggests that religious pluralism is only achieved by the intentional and positive engagement of differences.[^3]   Mere diversity, Eck maintains, is simply the fact that people from different backgrounds live in proximity to each other.  For Eck, pluralism, on the other hand, is when people from different backgrounds seek mutual understanding and positive cooperation with each other.

What can scholarship in religious studies offer to the realm of religious pluralism?  Scholars of religious study attempt to gain as comprehensive a view of human thought and action as possible.  These scholars are not satisfied with examining only what the social sciences defines as “religion.”  Instead, many scholars find religiousness and spirituality expressed in almost all human endeavors.  They move behind, before, beyond, as well as into areas called “religion” in order to encounter those ideas, images, and actions that express the ultimate meaning of existence for people in a certain time and place.  Religious studies scholars are concerned with religious ideas, images, and actions regardless of the context in which they may occur.  They examine religious beliefs, commitments, and devotion as part

of the comprehensive enterprise of trying to understand how humans express notions of ultimate order and meaning.  For them, the issues of power, loyalty, and identity are religious because they pertain to ultimate order and meaning.  These are the issues that begin to fashion the religion of the pluralistic culture.  They create pluralism because they affirm a set of values beyond traditional allegiances.  Diversity becomes pluralism, creating symbols, ideas, rituals, and myths that maintain the worth of plurality.  Pluralism becomes a religious phenomenon, and a study of the culture of religious pluralism becomes more than an enterprise in the social sciences.

The scope of this essay is twofold.  First, this essay is a study of religious pluralism.  By pluralism, I refer not to the fact there is a plurality of religions in the world, but to the intellectual responses to this plurality in the field of religious studies.  For some scholars it is a response asserting some measure of equal standing between the major religious traditions.  They maintain that God or the Absolute is speaking uniquely to each religious tradition, and it is through the ecumenical efforts of each tradition that the others will come to hear the unique word that God or the Absolute has spoken to it.[^4]     The question of truth becomes a question of the reliability of our ideas and assumptions.  Correspondingly, they deny types of uniqueness and absoluteness claimed for one religion or another.  For others, religious pluralism refers to an ideological or normative belief that there should be mutual respect between different religious systems and freedom for all.  They hold that peaceful coexistence between different religious systems is preferable to enmity between them.  Second, this essay will examine some of the factors evident in the current situation of religious pluralism from the perspective of the scholarship of religious studies.  That is at least the task I have set myself.