Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

One World: Many Voices

Intellectual Responses to Religious Pluralism

Zafer Tayseer Mohammad

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

An Overall View: the Meanings of Religious Pluralism   6

Religious Pluralism: Common Challenges 9

Secularization. 9

Forced Conversion. 9

Exclusive Claims 9

Scholarly Perspectives on Religious Pluralism   11

Wilfred Cantwell Smith. 11

Mircea Eliade 11

Ninian Smart 12

Stephen Kaplan. 13

Harold Coward. 14

John Rawls 15

Sayyed Hossein Nasr 16

Martin Marty. 17

Streams in the Valley. 19

Notes 22

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  Across the world, the paradigm of hope has been replaced by many sentiments of pessimism.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.

An Overall View: the Meanings of Religious Pluralism

Before beginning to discuss the intellectual responses to religious pluralism, some definitions and common challenges in today’s world of religious pluralism should be briefly identified.  Discussing pluralism is a complex matter.  The term pluralism is used to cover many aspects of the society in question - ethnicities, political ideologies, economic theories, genders, religions, and even, as found in some religious educational literature, a variety of methodological techniques, teachers, students, and philosophies of education.  The term religious pluralism, which is now in widespread use, reflects various realities and has different meanings.  Classical approaches in religious and sociological studies to understanding religious pluralism offer two possible models: the assimilation model of a cultural melting pot and the functionalist model of social disorder.  Neither appears adequate in the task of understanding contemporary religious pluralism.  For example, new religious immigrants are not steadily assimilating into the Western way of life, but are actively engaged in a process of transforming it.  Most importantly, most of us wish to avoid social chaos as a result of religious pluralism. We would rather prefer the emergence of society that celebrate religious pluralism and social and religious systems that increasingly accommodate plurality.

For some scholars, pluralism points to a state of society in which members of diverse ethnic, racial, religious or social groups maintain an autonomous participation in the development of their groups within the confines of a common civilization.  In certain contexts, religious pluralism can also refer to the plurality and pluriformity of societies, which have been a reality since long ago.  Historians point out that pluralism as an ideology was stressed most vigorously in England during the early 20th century by a group of writers, including Harold Laski and R.H. Tawney, who were reacting against what they alleged to be the alienation of individuals under conditions of unrestrained capitalism.[5] They argued it was necessary to integrate the individuals in a social and religious context which could give them a sense of community.  A historical example of such a society was the medieval structure of guilds, chartered cities, villages, monasteries, and universities in Europe of the 16th century.

For the British sociologist James Beckford, the religious pluralism characteristic of “Western democratic” societies to date has been a pluralism based on the right to religious freedom.[6]   This right, at the collective level, means that religious diversity is not simply de facto but alsode jure .  In this sense the various policies of tolerance in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, which to a varying extent enabled minority faiths not to disappear, were not yet a product of religious pluralism, Beckford argues.  In other words, religious pluralism is inseparable from the political modernity which was established in Europe and the United States near the turn of the eighteenth century.[7]

For Beckford and other scholars, religious pluralism is understood as a political principle.  Strong pluralism needs to be based on the right of individuals to religious freedom.  Some scholars distinguished between

several forms of religious pluralism.  In the diachronic perspective, a distinction is drawn between an emancipatory pluralism pertaining strictly to the individual’s right to religious liberty (and entailing, in particular, a de-ethnicization of religion), and a pluralism of identities marked by the demand from different religions for full and equal recognition of their individuality.  The real diversity of national models of emancipatory pluralism is also explained by the antithesis between individualistic pluralism and communitarian pluralism. “Individualistic pluralism” is founded on the freedom (independence) of individuals, whereas “communitarian pluralism” is a reaction to the assertion of modernity (rise of secularization and establishment of societies based on the individual).[8]  Since this reaction is forced to take cognizance of the new situation with regard to religious pluralism, it (re)creates, within society as a whole, a faith-based community that is closed and hostile to modernity.

Ole Riis, a Danish sociologist, has observed that the concept of religious pluralism may be used “in a descriptive and evaluative sense.”[9]   But, for Beckford, religious pluralism signifies a social and political system which grants every religion equal respect and facilities for individuals to practice their own religions without hindrance.  This involves allowing for the individuality of each religion and not turning the specific features of the dominant religion into the standard practice.  In fact, such pluralism would be “strong pluralism,” according to Beckford’s term.  In Beckford’s opinion, fact and value should be kept separate from each other for the sake of clarity.  He therefore believes that the term “religious diversity” should be used to describe empirical reality.  On the other hand, religious pluralism is a very specific way of considering this diversity, being “an ideological or evaluative response to empirical diversity” based on mutual respect between different religious systems with the aim of peaceful coexistence for the various religions.

  Much of the philosophical discussion on religious pluralism continues to center on the works of John Hick.  Hick has focused his attention on the differences between the various world religions.  His basic pluralistic contention is not that different religions make no conflicting truth claims.[10] In fact, he believes that the differences of beliefs between (and within) the traditions are legions and has often discussed these conflicts in great detail.  His basic pluralistic claim, rather, is that such differences are best seen as, different ways of conceiving and experiencing the one ultimate divine reality.” However, if the various religions are really “responses to a single ultimate transcendent reality,” how then does one account for the significant differences among these basic theistic systems?  Hick’s explanation is that this limitless divine reality has been thought and expressed by different human mentalities forming and formed by different intellectual frameworks and devotional techniques.[11]

Some scholars note that religious pluralism is more likely to generate conflict in societies where the dominant religion retains sovereignty as the operative religion of the social system.  Religious pluralism is less likely to generate conflict in societies in which the value of religious freedom is upheld by the operative religion of the social system, whether or not the

dominant religion retains sovereignty as the operative religion.[12]   For years, sociologists of religion used to point out that pluralism undermined participation in religion and agreed that the relationship was negative.  The best-known version of this theory was advanced by Peter Berger.[13]   He argued that religious pluralism reduces religious vitality through its effect on plausibility.[14]  The more worldviews there are, the less plausible each seems, and as a result, the less religious belief and activity there will be.  Over the last decade, this theory has been challenged by advocates of religious economics or a “supply-side” model of religious activity.  Led by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, the challengers have argued that the traditional view is backwards; religious pluralism can be positively associated with religious participation.  For them, the key mechanism is not plausibility, it is competition.  Starting from the assumption that “religious economics are like commercial economies,” they argue that competition among religious groups increases the quantity and quality of religious products available to consumers and, consequently, the total amount of religion that this consumed.[15]

Religious pluralism can assume many different forms.  To be more precise, pluralism can refer to an ideological or normative belief that there should be mutual respect between different cultural systems and freedom for them all.  It holds that peaceful coexistence between different cultural systems is preferable to enmity between them.  It sometimes suggests that a state of balance in the importance attached to different religious systems is better than an ideological monopoly or a very one-sided relationship between a dominant system and subordinate systems. Pluralism is not diversity alone, but an energetic engagement with diversity.  Pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference.  It means holding those deepest differences, even our religious ones, not in isolation, but in dialogue and a relationship with one another.

Religious Pluralism: Common Challenges

At this time it is appropriate to briefly highlight some common challenges and difficulties in present-day worlds of religious pluralism.

Secularization

Secularization has diverse meanings.  Secularization theory offers an easy answer to the problem of pluralism: religious pluralism does not matter because in a secularized social system, religion does not matter.  One of the secularization theory’s ironies is that it does not necessarily mean that religion becomes unproblematic.  On the contrary, religious pluralism becomes more controversial and challenging precisely at the time when secularization is in the process of losing some of its significance as a force shaping social and cultural life.

Religion and State

In England today, it seems that the practical problems raised by religious pluralism all call into question the status, the nature, and the significance of the Church of England.[16]   Some scholars outline the current debate on possible solutions for reforming religious representation in the House of Lords in order to take into account the increasing religious diversity in England.  They explain the various options, together with the underlying issues, advantages, and drawbacks of each.  Some scholars propose solutions that have long characterized this type of debate in England: disestablishment, political institutionalization of religious plurality, or the legal status quo with a rewriting of the role played by the Church of England.

Forced Conversion

An obvious issue of difficulty is the missionary activity of some religions which occurs when the superimposition of one’s own criterion upon the other is followed by efforts to convert the other.  Difficulty ensues when this desire and direction to carry one’s preaching and teaching to others is made in a militant or exclusive manner.  Religious pluralism seeks to promote the freedom of religion and conscience as a fundamental human right.  In this situation, religious pluralism, which is based on the right to religious freedom can be in turmoil.

Exclusive Claims

The phrase “religious exclusivist” is sometimes used by philosophers such as Peter van Inwagen as a label for anyone who claims that his or her perspective on a religious issue is true and that any incompatible perspective is false.  Exclusivists say that their religion is the only true religion and that those who adhere to it are saved.  A dangerous threat to the creative contribution of pluralism is that at times, some members of religions with exclusive claims react to the challenge of pluralism with militant exclusivism.  This may generate a violent ideological fundamentalism.  The fallacy of fundamentalism, or even divine intervention and dispensation, can be exploited to justify absolutism and exclusivity, thereby ending all hope of a solution based on dialogue, while claiming unrestricted license to kill and destroy.