Interreligious Resilience

Interreligious Leadership for a Pluralistic World

Michael S. Hogue, Dean Phillip Bell

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350213685
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religious Ecumenism & Interfaith

This book introduces the theory of interreligious resilience as a means to developing deeper and more effective interreligious engagement and resilience. Michael S. Hogue and Dean Phillip Bell advocate for interreligious resilience as the ability to grow through encounters with religious difference. They argue that rather than the capacity to endure change and return to a normal status quo, a deeper, more complex resilience is characterized by an ability to learn through disturbances, disruptions, and uncertainty. This book integrates theory and practice by situating the practical tasks of interreligious engagement in theological and social contexts. It is systemic and multidimensional, rather than staying focused on isolated interreligious issues or interpersonal interreligious encounters. This book is essential reading for all religious leaders and other community leaders working with religious people in an interreligious world.

Part 1

Building a Model of Interreligious Resilience

1
Interreligious History and Models
Addressing Religious Supremacy and Religious Pluralism

Religious Supremacy and Religious Pluralism

We have written this book because we are deeply worried about the kind of world we are living in and that our students and children are inhabiting—a world of increasing cultural and political polarization, religious intolerance, rising social and economic inequality, racial hostility and grievance, unprecedented global ecological, social, and health crises, and surging ethnonationalism and right-wing authoritarianism. These are global challenges, although locally they manifest and are experienced in different ways. But a world that is as divided and polarized as ours, a world of mutual suspicion and radical inequality, is incapable of effectively responding to social, moral, and political challenges such as these.

As Pope Francis wrote in a recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, global problems like the Covid-19 pandemic expose the false securities and profound fragmentation of the world.¹ Too many of us think of ourselves, and the planet, as invulnerable, and despite global digital interconnectivity and economic and ecological interdependence, the many ways we divide ourselves from one another persist. The divisions within our communities of identity and belonging, national, religious, and otherwise, can be as debilitating as the divisions between them. While our global challenges must be addressed by global initiatives, global initiatives cannot get off the ground if we are fragmented and polarized at local levels.

Although there are many legitimate approaches to the overwhelming challenges of life in the twenty-first century, our interest in this book is on the constructive role of interreligious leadership. Our view is that a resilience and vulnerability approach to interreligious engagement can help us not only to cross over, learn from, and collaborate with religious others, but that learning how to do these things can help us to work across other types of differences, including racial and political differences. Thus, although our focus is on interreligious issues, this focus is imbricated with, and to no small extent motivated by, a concern with the challenges of relating across other kinds of difference as well, all within a context in which globally entangled social, political, and ecological challenges require cross-difference collaboration and trust-building.

Since we are not politicians, journalists, or policy makers, but religious educators and scholars, we exorcise our anxieties and exercise our responsibilities by teaching and writing books. Through numerous conversations, as well as co-teaching and research, we have shaped our anxieties and our sense of responsibility into two orienting theses, one critical and the other constructive.

Our critical thesis is that much of the fear and loathing pervading our world, present and past, is culturally formatted by patterns of religious supremacy. More precisely, we believe that the logic of religious supremacy is fractal.² By this we mean that it is not exclusive to any religious tradition, historical moment, or religious doctrine, but is a pattern of belief and belonging that shows up across and within traditions, and that it functions as a vector and amplifier of other contemporary social challenges, from political polarization to racial supremacy and the global surge of ethnonationalism. Our constructive thesis is that interreligious resilience is a counter-fractal to religious supremacy and that the cultivation of interreligious resilience is conducive to the broader ideal of social pluralism. In other words, we believe that interreligious engagement can be a direct path to undoing patterns of religious supremacy, and that theories of resilience and vulnerability offer a new set of tools for interreligious leaders as they navigate various types and levels of interreligious engagement.

The connections between religious and other social pathologies have long been recognized. As interreligious scholar Diana Eck has observed, “[T]he past 100 years have provided ample evidence that religions are still powerful producers of symbolic weaponry for the strife of humankind.”³ There is no religion and no place in the world that is immune from religiously stoked and sanctioned violence: “[R]eligious rhetoric and the communal power of religious identity have been employed in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and Sri Lanka, in the Sikh separatist movement in the Punjab, and in the competition between Muslims and Christians in sub-Saharan Africa.”⁴ The same is true in Europe and the United States, where recent years have seen an increase in white Christian ethnonationalism and anti-Semitism, and in India, with the ascendance of Hindu chauvinism and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Nor are religiously fueled violence and hatred recent phenomena. Religious supremacy, organized around particular practices of religious belief and belonging, has legitimated and intensified human conflict and division throughout history. According to the Christian philosopher of religion John Hick, “almost all human conflicts have been validated and intensified by a religious sanction.” And the reason for this, according to Hick, is that “each of the great world faiths has either assumed or asserted its own unique superiority as the one and only true faith and path to the highest good. . . . These exclusive claims to absolute truth have exacerbated the division of the human community into rival groups, and have repeatedly been invoked in support of oppression, slavery, conquest, and exploitation.”⁵

Absolutist and exclusive modes of religious belief are constitutive of what we mean by religious supremacy, and there is no doubt that they have contributed to the history of religious violence. But along with Eck we would add that these modes of belief create divisions within the religions at least as much as between them. As Eck writes, “At present, the greatest religious tensions are not between any one religion and another; they are the tensions between the fundamentalist and the pluralist in each and every religious tradition.”⁶ If this is so, then religious supremacy, and the strife, conflict, and violence sanctioned by it, is not an essential feature of all religions or specific religions. Rather, religious supremacy emerges through patterns of belief and belonging that show up across and within them. Comparative theologian John Thatamanil illustrates these patterns well: “I can understand God without help from you. In the quest for religious truth, I don’t need you if you aren’t part of my tradition.”⁷

While it is undoubtedly true that people throughout history have caused great harm in the name of religion, it is also true that the religions are and have been existentially and socially liberating, morally orienting, aesthetically inspiring, and intellectually deepening. The religions and forms of religiosity certainly have divided people, but religions also contain wisdom that attunes minds and hearts to sacred ideals and values that transcend individual and group interests and inspire works of compassion, love, and justice. As Hick puts it,

religion has been responsible for the saintly lives of men and women who have risen above self-centeredness to serve God or to live out the Dharma; it has been a major influence in such developments as the abolition of slavery, the beginning of the liberation of women, the struggle against racial discrimination, the rise of political concern for the unjustly disadvantaged and the search for international disarmament and world peace.⁸

And yet “religion has [also] sanctioned human sacrifices and the torture and burning of ‘witches’ and ‘heretics’; it has blessed almost every war that has ever been fought; and it has been used as an instrument for gaining power over and exploiting large groups of people, bestowing its validation upon massively inequitable social systems.”⁹ In short, all religions are guilty of inciting conflict and violence, and all religions have worked for compassion, justice, and peace—no religion has a monopoly on violence or good. If it is true that religions have been an agent and accomplice of transformative good as well as great harm, then perhaps the religions themselves contain the antidote to their own poisons.

The tools of resilience and vulnerability theory can help us to engage religious others, even those within our own traditions who practice belief and belonging differently, in constructive new ways. They can help us to sustain these engagements and build relational rapport across our differences by helping us discover that our religious values are not the only important religious values, our religious ideals are not the only ideals worthy of reverence, and our rituals are not the only meaningful rituals. This can lead to modes of belief and belonging that are faithful to our traditions and can also foster pluralism, mutual learning, and collaboration.

We believe the concept of interreligious resilience that we develop in this book is an antidote to religious supremacy. It is a personal and communal condition for the broader social ideal of pluralism, which we will now examine a bit more closely. By pluralism we are not merely referring to the differences and diversities that are “out there” in the world, but to a mindset or attitude toward difference, one that individual religious people can cultivate, and religious communities can nurture and transmit. Pluralism does not presume the abandonment of deep religious commitment to a specific religious tradition. As Eck describes it, rather than “giving up the distinctiveness of [one’s] own tradition,” pluralism is about “engaging the other in the mutual education, and potentially, the mutual transformation of dialogue.”¹⁰ Eck articulates four aspects of pluralism: (1) pluralism is not merely respect for diversity, but energetic engagement of diversity; (2) pluralism is not merely the tolerance of difference, but the active effort to build understanding across difference; (3) pluralism is not the abandonment of commitments or religious ambivalence, but the encounter of commitments; and (4) pluralism is based on dialog.¹¹

Pluralism is thus a way of embodying and expressing religious identity and interpreting and navigating religious difference, such that those differences are not experienced as a threat to be avoided or defeated. A pluralist mindset explores religious differences as opportunities for mutual learning that can lead to the creative deepening of diverse religious paths—the learning does not lead one away from one’s own religious commitments, but more fully into them. Pluralism is a mindset and a social aim that can be developed within all religious traditions. It is not a departure from the truths of distinctive religious traditions, but an interpretation of religious difference that can be understood as internally compatible with, even entailed by, a commitment to those distinctive truths.¹² To speak of religious diversity, on the other hand, is simply to speak of the objective reality of religious difference in the world—there are different religious truths and different religious aims; diverse accounts of the divine, sacred, and holy; diverse conceptions of God and religious ideals; diverse ways of worshipping and practicing; different institutional and organizational forms of religious life; and much of this diversity exists within as well as between the religious traditions.

Pluralism is also different from tolerance. Tolerance presumes a negative understanding of religious difference, whereas pluralism presumes a positive appreciation of religious difference.¹³ Tolerance is a relatively low bar. At its best, tolerance is an attitude of indifference to religious difference, a “live and let live” attitude; but it is often embodied as a patronizing response to religious difference. As Goethe once put this, “To tolerate is to insult.”¹⁴ With this in mind, Jewish philosopher Paul Mendes-Flohr argues that the ideal of tolerance is problematic for numerous conceptual and practical reasons. Practically, for instance, does tolerance entail that the intolerable should be tolerated? If not, where should lines be drawn, and on which or whose terms? As Mendes-Flohr notes, law in liberal democratic societies is “crafted to ensure the maximal freedom and thus diversity of opinion and practice,” but often “has difficulty in drawing the lines between toleration and legal censure. The civic duty to tolerate and the moral injunction to oppose what is objectionable are often in conflict, if not seemingly irreconcilable.”¹⁵

Besides the legal and moral dilemmas of tolerance, there is something condescending in the very idea of tolerance. An implicit assumption of those who claim tolerance is that that they are following the true and right way, and others are not, but so long as the others are not causing harm (especially to them), or somehow infringing upon or challenging what is really true and right, there is no need to worry. Or, tolerance could be rooted in a humanistic or ethical universalism, which holds that there is something essentially the same beneath all the cultural and historical accretions of religious difference. Because the distinct particulars of different religious traditions do not substantively matter according to this view, they can be ignored, or dismissed. The problem with this type of tolerance, of course, is that it is not really a way of engaging difference at all. Rather, it is a form of intercultural minimization, presented in the guise of philosophical sophistication or cultural liberalism; but it treats differences as superficial, and in so doing illiberally dismisses the self-understanding of the practitioners of different traditions.

As a social ideal, pluralism aims for the possibility that religious differences, as well as other kinds of difference, can be positively appreciated and mutually enriching. The pluralist assumes not only that different religions possess or aim for different truths but also that encounters with those different truths can help to enlarge, deepen, or further illuminate one’s own religious path. Thus, an important difference between pluralism and tolerance is that the pluralist seeks to appreciate and learn from religious differences, rather than merely to put up with them, avoid them, or deny that there is anything possible to learn from them.

What we are suggesting, then, is that appreciating and learning from religious difference entails a certain interreligious vulnerability, the risk of opening oneself to learning with and from the religious other. The practice of engaging this interreligious vulnerability is essential to the cultivation of interreligious resilience since vulnerability is at the core of resilience (and the first key component of the VITA pathway to interreligious resilience). And interreligious resilience is spiritually deepening and contributes to the social aim of religious pluralism by enabling us to continue risking the vulnerability of ongoing religious learning.

So, interreligious resilience is an antidote to religious supremacy as well as a step toward pluralism, and interreligious vulnerability is a pathway to interreligious resilience. This may seem counterintuitive, especially if one thinks of resilience and vulnerability as opposed and distinct from one another. But, as we will discuss more fully in Chapter 4, the reality is that resilience is developed through vulnerability: resilience is a learned personal, communal, or systemic capacity that can only be cultivated through the experience of vulnerability. The task of interreligious leaders, as expressed in our constructive thesis, is to facilitate interreligious encounters such that the practice of interreligious vulnerability can lead to interreligious resilience. The benefits of interreligious resilience are multiple: from personal spiritual growth to deepened interpersonal interreligious friendships, from more effective interreligious collaborations to increased religious literacy, the reduction of religiously fueled prejudice and bigotry, and broader civic and social goods.¹⁶ A resilience and vulnerability approach to interreligious engagement equips interreligious leaders with tools that can help them lead their communities toward the aim of interreligious resilience. We now turn to an overview of broader historical trends in US interreligious engagement.

History of Interreligious Engagement in the United States

To understand the nature, challenges, and opportunities of interreligious engagement today, it is instructive to provide a brief historical overview of interreligious engagement and the notions of religion that underpin it. But even a brief review of the history of interreligious engagement in the United States raises vexing methodological, theoretical, and historical questions. At what point in history should one begin such a review? What counts as “interreligious engagement”? Wherev...