Pluralism versus Tolerance: Turning Principles into Action in Interfaith Organizations

Lauren R. Kerby

In contemporary discussions of how societies manage religious diversity, two strategies are often juxtaposed: pluralism and tolerance. Both are attitudes that shape the kind of interaction between different religious groups in such a way that peace and social order are maintained. However, among liberals in the West, “pluralism” has a distinctly different valence from “tolerance.” Whereas pluralism is viewed positively, as the pinnacle of achievement for a religiously diverse society, tolerance is viewed negatively, as the bare minimum of what is required to maintain peace in such a society. In this view, tolerance is only a stepping-stone on the way to the ultimate goal, pluralism. Despite this popular understanding that pluralism is the superior option, the distinctions between the two terms are not always clear. But the differences are well worth our attention if we hope to understand the very different ways in which tolerance and pluralism operate in the world.

This paper articulates the difference between pluralism and tolerance through an analysis of two nonprofit organizations dedicated to creating and maintaining peace in a religiously diverse world. The first, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), takes an approach to religion and religious differences based on pluralism. The second, CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion,[1] bases its approach on tolerance. A comparison of the organizations’ methods and outcomes demonstrates that we are not talking about an abstract philosophical distinction whose effects are confined solely to mission statements and annual reports. On the contrary: the basis in pluralism or tolerance, respectively, profoundly shapes the methods and, therefore, the outcomes of each organization’s projects. By comparing pluralism and tolerance in this way—“in action,” so to speak—we can better see the benefits and limitations of each. The key distinction between pluralism and tolerance is the value assigned to difference, which directly impacts the degree to which differences are hidden or revealed within an interfaith program. I argue that because difference is essential to the construction and maintenance of identity, a successful interfaith program will be one that values differences over commonalities, thereby offering the maximum amount of protection for identity in a religiously diverse society. The pluralist approach ultimately privileges commonalities, while the tolerant approach privileges difference and protects identity. Thus, despite its negative connotations in the contemporary West, tolerance is a viable strategy for living with religious difference.

Difference, Identity, and Threat

Before turning to concrete interfaith approaches to managing religious difference, a brief discussion of why difference is so important is in order. In short, difference plays an essential role in constructing and maintaining identity. The identity of any group is circumscribed by its boundaries, which are by their nature exclusive; boundaries indicate that what is on one side of the boundary differs from what is on the other side. Boundaries separate Group A from Group B, Group B from Group C, and so on. Without the presence of difference, the boundaries are meaningless, and the distinct identities of each group merge into indistinct homogeneity because there is nothing left to separate them. No group can define its identity without saying how it is different from the surrounding groups. The construction of a group’s identity requires the articulation of both what they are and what they are not. For a religious group, this may mean a first attempt at differentiating orthodoxy from heresy. For instance, the first Christian creeds and canons emerged not out of a spontaneous desire for group identity, but out of a need to systematize Christian doctrines as a means of guarding against the heresies of Arius or the Docetics. Defining orthodoxy was simultaneously a process of defining heresy. Drawing the boundary around early Christian identity required the presence of religious difference in order for early Christian leaders to say both who they were and who they were not.

This need for difference (or deviance) is the point Durkheim makes when he argues that crime is both normal and necessary to social life.[2] Society requires the presence of “deviants” who violate social norms, because by articulating what it means to violate those norms, it articulates the norms themselves.[3] Kai Erikson adds that group members must know something of what exists beyond the boundaries of the group if they are to understand what it means to be within those boundaries.[4] By confronting and punishing deviance, the group “is making a statement about the nature and placement of its boundaries. It is declaring how much variability and diversity can be tolerated within the group before it begins to lose its distinctive shape, its unique identity.”[5] Deviance within the group and difference outside of it are both essential to maintaining group identity. For this reason, identity is threatened when difference is trivialized, ignored, or even erased, as is the case in a pluralist approach to religious diversity.

Yet the role of difference is paradoxical: at the same time that difference is necessary for the articulation of identity, the presence of difference can also be deeply threatening. When Group A and Group B live adjacent to each other but do not intermingle, difference remains an abstract concept. The people on the other side of the boundary are said to have different practices or beliefs, but they are not immediately visible to the members of the other group. In contrast, when members of Group A and Group B are neighbors, living side by side in the same space, the constant, visible presence of difference can be destabilizing. Members of both groups are forced to confront the fact that their way of life is not the only way of life; others may have different rules, practices, values, or beliefs. This can be incredibly destabilizing—at the very least, it is uncomfortable—but modern society is composed largely of such intermingling of groups, and with this shift comes a significant threat to identity. How a given group deals with this threat is the central challenge faced by organizations seeking to mitigate the conflicts caused by the presence of religious diversity.

Backgrounds of IFYC and CEDAR

Both IFYC and CEDAR were founded at the turn of the 21st century, as consciousness of religious diversity grew in America and around the world. They share the goal of meeting the challenges posed by religious diversity with programs based on social scientific theories that teach participants how to deal with the threat a diverse community poses to their own identity.  However, because their underlying principles—pluralism in the case of IFYC, tolerance in the case of CEDAR— differ, beyond these initial similarities their strategies and outcomes bear little resemblance to each other. Both give their participants tools to address the discomfort caused by the presence of religious difference, but they do so in ways fundamentally shaped by their respective philosophical basis in pluralism or tolerance.

IFYC was first imagined by its founders—Eboo Patel, Jeff Pinzino, and Anastasia White—in 1998 during an interfaith conference at Stanford. The three young people realized a need for interfaith outreach that specifically targeted the rising generation of college undergraduates. With support from three leading interreligious organizations, they slowly began to build their organizational infrastructure. In 2002, with the aid of a $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, the organization was incorporated as Interfaith Youth Core, with headquarters in Chicago. Over the next few years the group’s work gained national and international attention.[6] In 2005 IFYC partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative, a group dedicated to turning ideas into action. As a result of that partnership, IFYC worked with Queen Rania of Jordan to establish an exchange program for Jordanian and American students. IFYC also partnered with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in 2007 to train religious leaders as ambassadors for the United Nations Millennium Development goals, particularly the eradication of malaria. Most recently, in 2012, IFYC partnered with the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships to challenge over 270 college campuses to increase interfaith community service.[7] To date, IFYC has operated on five continents to train thousands of young interfaith leaders, including those on over 200 college campuses in the United States.[8] In addition, Eboo Patel’s memoir, Acts of Faith, which details the founding and philosophy of IFYC, has been required reading for freshmen at over a dozen colleges.

The main focus of IFYC in 2013 remains the training of undergraduate students to lead interfaith activities on their home campuses. Several times a year, students, faculty, and administrators from colleges across the nation gather in major American cities for Interfaith Leadership Institutes (ILIs). Students are trained to “build relationships across identities, tell powerful stories to bridge divides, and mobilize their campuses through interfaith projects.” Faculty and administrators “network, share best practices, and partner with their students to learn how to transform their campuses.”[9] Both students and faculty learn about IFYC’s “Better Together” movement and how they can implement it at their own colleges or universities. “Better Together” is a flexible slogan that can be applied to nearly any campus event that fits three requirements: students are encouraged to “voice their religious/non-religious values, identities, and experiences; engage in conversations about those values, etc., across lines of difference; and act together based on the values they share to improve their campus and their community.”[10] These activities range from food drives to concerts, fast-a-thons to interreligious speed talking. At the ILIs, students are trained to be grassroots organizers of the interfaith movement and given the skills they need to coordinate Better Together activities on their campuses. They also learn about the other religious and nonreligious perspectives of their peers at the ILI and on campus.

The underlying philosophy of IFYC is pluralism, a concept that informs both its mission and its methodology. IFYC, following Harvard scholar Diana Eck, defines pluralism as a positive attitude toward religious diversity that requires “the active engagement of diversity toward a common end.” Whereas “diversity” merely describes a fact of modern life, “pluralism” indicates a particular orientation toward that diversity.[11] A religiously plural world, according to IFYC, is one characterized by “respect for people’s diverse religious and non-religious identities”; “mutually inspiring relationships between people of different backgrounds”; and “common action for the common good.”[12] All of the activities and campaigns of IFYC are designed to foster this pluralist attitude in students, so that they come to understand diversity not just as a fact but as a good. The problem of discomfort caused by religious diversity is resolved by teaching students to understand diversity as positive. IFYC leaders Eboo Patel and Cassie Meyer dismiss tolerance, in contrast, as merely “superficial,” a tool that “may or may not be able to stand the challenge of real tension.”[13] Like many activists in the world of interreligious dialogue, they see tolerance as a weak alternative to pluralism, and they refuse to settle for this lesser option. Everything IFYC does is designed to foster attitudes and behaviors that treat difference as a positive thing, a fact of life that is to be embraced, not avoided.

Like IFYC, CEDAR recognizes the inevitable fact of religious diversity and offers strategies for dealing with it, though its attitude to the inherent value of difference itself is far more ambivalent. The idea for CEDAR was first conceived in 2001 as an international summer school, when a group of friends met in a restaurant in Sarajevo and discussed how religion might be an asset in “building a more tolerant and pluralistic world.” The inaugural summer school was held in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia in 2003, focusing on the role of religion in the conflicts of former Yugoslavia.[14] In subsequent years the school was held in a variety of other locations around the world—including Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Indonesia—on a wide range of topics, from the “Muslim question” in Europe to religious syncretism in traditional Bulgarian societies.[15] After 10 years of summer schools using this model, CEDAR’s mission expanded to the point where organizational changes became necessary. In addition to adopting its new name,[16] it moved from holding a single annual summer school in changing locations to establishing several more permanent programs in various countries with CEDAR support. These include the Balkan Summer School on Religion and Public Life in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; the Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies in Toronto, Canada; the Equator Peace Academy in the Great Lakes Region of Africa; and future programs planned for southern Africa and central Asia. Each of these programs utilizes the pedagogic principles developed by CEDAR to help participants engage with various forms of difference and develop tolerant behaviors and attitudes.

The primary model CEDAR uses is a two-week summer school—hosted by a local collaborating partner, usually a university—that draws participants (fellows) and lecturers from around the world representing a broad range of religious and nonreligious backgrounds. Over the course of the two weeks, fellows participate in an intensive combination of lectures, site visits, and discussions, as well as meals, films, and informal recreational activities. Through these activities, fellows learn not only cognitively, but also experientially and affectively. These three dimensions of new knowledge help to overturn fellows’ assumptions about self, other, and the interactions between the two.[17] The liminal space of the summer school functions as a sort of laboratory in which to practice living with difference, and fellows learn to do so during their informal, quotidian interactions as much as in formal lectures or discussions. In recent years, the school has expanded its focus from solely religious differences; it now includes differences in ethnicity, culture, sexuality, and gender, since these, too, are essential aspects of many people’s group identities. All of these differences emerge in one way or another during the summer school, and fellows must improvise solutions for how they will live together in spite of them. Fellows are not required in any way to accept, validate, or otherwise support the differences of their peers. What they must do, though, is learn how to live with those differences for the duration of the school.[18]

“Living with difference,” CEDAR’s catchphrase, in effect indicates the premise on which the entire enterprise is based: tolerance. Unlike IFYC, with its ambitious goal of teaching people to value diversity, CEDAR’s more modest goal is simply to teach people that they can—and in many cases, must—live together differently. In CEDAR’s view tolerance is not “superficial” and insufficient, but profoundly difficult yet essential to life in a religiously diverse society. Many interfaith organizations, including IFYC, ultimately focus most of their attention on commonalities between religious groups while paying lip service to the differences that divide them. In contrast, CEDAR begins with the understanding that differences are essential and inevitable: “Our focus is on difference and seeks not to trivialize, privatize, or otherwise ‘overcome’ difference, but rather to accept the constitutive differences among human individuals and groups and from that baseline begin the hard work of learning to live with such differences and build a modicum of trust and solidarity despite these differences and all they imply.”[19] Fellows are not encouraged to see diversity as a good or bad thing, but rather as an unavoidable fact of life. They may be made to feel uncomfortable as a result of this difference, but they learn—cognitively, experientially, and affectively—that they can live with this discomfort. In fact, they may not be able to avoid discomfort without giving up fundamental religious commitments to exclusive truth claims. IFYC’s pluralism demands that diversity be viewed in a positive light; CEDAR demands only that the discomfort that accompanies diversity be tolerated.

Approaches to Difference

As a result of their respective foundations in pluralism and tolerance, IFYC and CEDAR’s strategies for engaging difference (or not) through their programs stand in stark contrast to each other. IFYC makes a point of acknowledging that religious differences do exist, unlike many other interfaith programs, which emphasize that differences are merely superficial distortions of core commonalities. However,  its programs are designed to hide religious differences in subtle ways so as to make it easier in the end to subordinate them to a shared liberal, pluralist worldview. CEDAR, on the other hand, makes religious (and other forms of) differences the focal point of its program; if commonalities are ever acknowledged, it is only implicitly or privately, in conversations among the fellows. These divergent approaches to difference shape every aspect of the two programs: the selection of participants, the discussion or reflection topics, the design of activities and choice of spaces in which they take place, and the rules that govern participants’ behavior.

A first important point of comparison between the two programs is what kind of community each builds. In the case of IFYC, the communities involved in various Better Together and other campaigns are for the most part pre-existing. Because IFYC focuses on college students, the community is already there: the college campus. Many smaller communities may come together from across campus to participate in a Better Together event, but all the participants share a significant marker as students at the same college. Moreover, despite colleges’ efforts to increase diversity, students have several important things in common. They have the financial means to attend college; they share the same level of education; and, most important, they already live together, sharing academic and social facilities and other components of college life. They may differ in many important ways, but their similarities are what brought them together in the first place and remain what structures their lives together. They are already a community with a shared social world that easily subordinates difference to what they have in common, at least on the surface.

The CEDAR community, in contrast, is temporary, existing for the first time on the first day of the program. Some participants may be acquainted with each other prior to their arrival, but most are not. Some may share native languages, but rarely with more than one other person. Since the summer school provides a limited number of scholarships and travel assistance for fellows, they may not have similar financial means. And they do not share religious commitments, since they represent a wide range of religious and nonreligious affiliations. What they do share, typically, are two things: a college-level or higher education and a sufficiently strong interest in religion and public life to travel across the globe to study it. From this base, a community of approximately 25 fellows is built. For two weeks they must live together, eat every meal together, and attend all summer school activities together. By virtue of this structure, their similarities and differences are initially given equal weight; there is no overarching shared community to mask differences.

Once the respective programs have started, both IFYC and CEDAR have the opportunity to highlight either sameness or difference through discussions, reflections, and stories that participants tell one another. Both choose to highlight difference, though to different degrees. For IFYC, one of the core requirements for a Better Together event is that students articulate their religious or nonreligious identities and values; presumably, this is where differences along religious lines would first arise, temporarily disrupting the sense of homogeneity among a group of students from the same college.[20] However, articulating these different identities is only the starting point. Subsequent activities and conversations work to smooth over this disruption, reinstating the sense of sameness in spite of expressed differences. Suggested questions and topics for interfaith discussions include the following: “What values do you think you share with people of other religious and non-religious identities? Share an experience where you saw these shared values in action. How does the civil rights movement exemplify interfaith co­operation? How do you think interfaith cooperation affected the impact of the civil rights movement? How does it connect to our work today?”[21] Students are expected to discuss their different identities, beliefs, experiences, and values; but the implicit norm is eventually to find points of commonality amidst the differences. This is a necessity in a group dedicated to taking common action for the common good. Religious differences can be expressed, but they are expected not to diverge too far from values upon which all students can agree and therefore act. The discomfort that arises from articulating differences is quickly alleviated by a return to homogeneity: everyone can agree on raising money for a soup kitchen or building a house for a homeless family. Differences may be expressed, but they are subordinated to commonalities.

CEDAR has no such normative approach toward common values and experiences. If anything, its norm is to bring difference to the surface and keep it there, despite the discomfort it typically causes for everyone involved. When fellows first meet, their natural inclination is to focus on things they have in common in their introductory conversations. Rarely do people meet a stranger and immediately begin listing the ways in which they are different. However, all of the discussions, lectures, and facilitations of the summer school are designed to disrupt any complacent sense of sameness that may develop. When I participated in the Balkan Summer School in 2013, not once were we asked to reflect on something we shared with the other fellows or other communities; every topic was designed to highlight differences and to force fellows to live with the discomfort that comes with being conscious of differences. Nor was this awareness of difference limited to our structured events: even in our informal activities—including meals, swimming, and conversations over drinks—we became more conscious of how religious differences manifest themselves in everyday life. Many fellows were fascinated by kosher laws, and mealtime conversation frequently involved this topic. Swimming breaks also highlighted our differences, perhaps unexpectedly, when one Muslim woman was unable to participate because of modesty requirements. Points of difference that might previously have gone unnoticed became inescapable, both because we were taught to look for them and because we were living together and sharing all of our daily activities.

IFYC’s and CEDAR’s approaches to difference shape more than just overt discussions about religion; they also shape the activities undertaken by participants, beginning with the type of space in which communal activities take place. Generally speaking, both groups conduct activities in two types of space: public space and private space. Public space is the overlapping space shared by all religious communities (or other communities of difference). It may include dining halls, city parks, arenas, classrooms, and so on. Private space, in contrast, is the space reserved for the use of a particular group separately from other groups. Most important, private space includes sacred space, the space in which religious rituals occur. The degree to which an interreligious group conducts its activities in private or sacred space is indicative of its attitude toward difference. Entering another group’s sacred space is a palpable experience of difference. Everything, from the architecture to the symbols to the rituals, is a reminder that this group is not one’s own. If sacred spaces feature frequently in an interfaith program, the participants experience difference as a focal point of the program. If most of the spaces used in an interfaith program are public, with only occasional entry into sacred spaces, the program is more interested in what it can accomplish in public, shared space than in addressing the discomfort that comes with unfamiliar sacred space.

Both IFYC and CEDAR use both types of space: public and private/sacred. However, CEDAR uses a higher percentage of sacred space than IFYC does. During the two weeks of the summer school, CEDAR fellows visit some form of religious site nearly every day; the experience of different sacred spaces is an integral part of CEDAR’s strategy of pushing fellows to confront difference. By this repeated exposure to a variety of differences, fellows learn not to erase their discomfort, but to live with it. For IFYC participants, sacred space is also important, but campus-wide events are rarely held in a sacred space. Small groups may visit a variety of houses of worship and be encouraged to appreciate the differences they observe, but different religious spaces are not usually the focal point of Better Together events. Rather, these events are typically held in public spaces that can hold more people and are less disconcertingly different. They accomplish many things, such as building relationships between people of different faiths and supporting a variety of social justice causes; but the focus is not on difference itself. Space is a key factor in determining to what degree difference will be experienced and how it will be evaluated.

The tendency toward using public rather than private/sacred space, or vice versa, also impacts the types of activities that comprise the interfaith program and the lessons participants learn about difference. IFYC activities that occur in public space may be ordinary activities like meals, but more often they are extraordinary actions such as fasts, house building, concerts, and so on. These actions are usually one-time (or perhaps annual) events that bring students of many different religious and nonreligious backgrounds together for a brief time and then send them on their way. Being together despite differences is an exceptional occurrence. Ideally, students’ awareness of religious differences is raised, but there is no compulsion for students to continue to engage difference as they go through their daily lives. The exception to this may be the leaders of any IFYC-affiliated group on campus. Student leaders planning and executing events will have much more sustained contact with one another than regular participants, and IFYC encourages groups to have a diverse student leadership. The main effect, however, is that students who participate in a Better Together event experience difference temporarily in an out-of-the-ordinary way; while they may take away an improved cognitive understanding of difference, their actual experience of difference is limited to a brief, extraordinary moment.

CEDAR’s preference for private/sacred space has the opposite effect on fellows’ experience of difference. Far from being out of the ordinary, the experience of difference is the norm, and fellows encounter it in all aspects of everyday life during the summer school. This includes experiencing difference within sacred spaces. Fellows are required to attend all summer school activities, including visits to religious sites that are not their own. Instead of participating in extraordinary activities like building a house, summer school fellows observe one another’s daily rituals, both religious and nonreligious. Unlike IFYC participants, CEDAR fellows experience difference in a way not limited to discrete events once or twice in a semester; theirs is a sustained encounter for the duration of the summer school. These two ways of experiencing difference, the extraordinary and the ordinary, have profoundly different implications for how participants expect/view difference in their subsequent lives. Students in IFYC programs may view difference as something that can be temporarily engaged toward a positive end, while CEDAR fellows are more likely to see it as an everyday fact with which they must live constantly and permanently.

The Problem of Proselytism

While all of the programming choices made by IFYC and CEDAR reflect their respective commitments to pluralism and tolerance, the impact of these choices is subtle. They implicitly shape how participants encounter difference during the interfaith program, but they are rarely, if ever, stated explicitly during the program. There is, however, one area in which pluralist or tolerant philosophies are forced to the surface: the rules governing dialogue or exchanges between participants. Both programs acknowledge that participants’ religious identities may center on exclusive truth claims that put those identities at odds with others. If those identities are to be expressed in a constructive way, the interfaith program must have clear guidelines for how this should be done. Creating those guidelines requires an explicit articulation of the program’s philosophy regarding religious difference, the degree to which it can be expressed, and to what end it can be engaged.

During interfaith dialogues in IFYC, participants are encouraged to “bring their full identities to the table.”[22] For those whose religious identities are sufficiently liberal that they do not feel challenged by the presence of others with diametrically opposed identities, this is relatively easy. For those on the more conservative end of their tradition’s spectrum, though, this sort of encounter can be extremely difficult. Some interfaith organizations ask their participants to deny their exclusive truth claims during dialogues, to assert that their own religion is not the only way. Patel rightly criticizes this approach for attracting only the most liberal members of most religions and effectively excluding the more conservative members from the conversation altogether.[23] To avoid this problem, IFYC emphasizes that one component of Eck’s definition of pluralism—“respect for individual religious or non-religious identity”—requires that participants be “allowed to believe that they are right and others are wrong.”[24] More important, they are allowed to express their “full identity,” meaning an identity with its exclusive truth claims intact. IFYC repeatedly states in its literature that interfaith dialogue “should not deny the real differences and disagreements that exist between religious and non-religious perspectives, nor should it diminish the reality that exclusive truths play in many religious differences.”[25] However, what happens once that exclusivist identity is expressed is key to understanding IFYC’s pluralist approach.

As Patel and Meyer put it, when dealing with exclusive truth claims in interfaith dialogue, “there need to be rules for how this conversation can play out.”[26] Simply put, the rule is that proselytism is prohibited: “Although proselytizing is an important part of many religious traditions, [interfaith dialogue] is not the space for it.”[27] Participants are asked to “acknowledge that others’ religious or non-religious perspectives are as precious to them as yours is to you” and thus to refrain from attempting to convert their dialogue partners. Instead, after this expression of participants’ “full identities,” the conversation is channeled away from proselytism and toward common values. This dialogue structure both reveals difference and subsequently hides it, for there is a clear limit to the amount of difference that can be expressed, and even at its most extreme, difference is still subordinated to commonality. This is the epitome of the pluralist approach: difference is positive, but only insofar as it can be made to serve a common purpose. When difference is expressed to such a degree that it threatens to be divisive—for example, proselytism—it must be suppressed.

CEDAR also has rules governing participants’ conversations, but they do not include a prohibition against proselytism. The summer school has only two absolute requirements: (1) fellows must attend every event, and (2) they cannot claim for their own community a monopoly on human suffering. In other words, everyone is expected to be a present and participating member of the summer school community, and to allow space for their peers to express their own experiences without denying the legitimacy or significance of those experiences. However, nowhere is proselytism expressly prohibited. To be sure, the implicit norm of the summer school was to avoid overt proselytism; as in most interfaith programs, proselytism is considered at the very least impolite. But to attempt to convert another fellow would not be against the rules. If anything, such an event would draw attention to how significant our religious differences are and how profoundly destabilizing it is to realize that we do not agree about what is true. CEDAR does not cut off the expression of difference when it threatens to be divisive, even when it veers into proselytism. Recognizing that extreme degree of difference and yet continuing to live together is the core project of the summer school. If the community of fellows can do that and then still sit down and eat together despite their profound disagreement, they have learned to exercise the sort of tolerance that makes it possible to live in a religiously diverse world, even without necessarily valuing diversity as a good thing.

The central challenge posed by religious diversity emerges in this confrontation between exclusive truth claims and, through it, the primary difference between pluralism and tolerance when they are put into action. Both organizations acknowledge that religious differences exist— but what to do with them? IFYC’s pluralist approach encourages passive expressions of difference, but any action taken must be an expression of “common values for the common good.” Proselytism is off limits precisely because diversity is understood to be a positive thing. After all, if diversity is inherently good, there ought not to be an impulse to eliminate that diversity by converting others to a single Truth. Thus, students can express their own difference, but they cannot try to persuade others to join them. This  prevents any arguments over who is ultimately right, which may allow participants to build houses together; but it also has the effect of privatizing religious difference, of making it something off limits for debate. Respect becomes a code word for silence. Moreover, when these differences are constrained to allow commonalities to remain the focus of both attention and action, differences are trivialized. Lip service is paid to their importance as individuals express their own religious identities; but that which has real value for pluralists remains that which is held in common.

As an organization founded on the principle of tolerance, CEDAR has no such compunction to promote diversity as something to be protected by prohibiting anything that might threaten it, including proselytism. The summer school’s goal is to make fellows aware of their differences and the significance of those differences—and to give them space to learn how to live together anyway. They are taught to exercise not pluralism but tolerance, which by its very definition recognizes that diversity is not the preferred option. Tolerance allows religious identities to be expressed fully, even to the point of expressing discomfort with diversity. However, what the summer school also teaches is that diversity is an inescapable fact of life. Fellows must find their own strategies for dealing with their discomfort. Those strategies can include anything except avoiding the source of discomfort by failing to attend scheduled activities. Difference in this way is not trivialized, but rather understood to be concomitant with identity. It cannot be subordinated to commonality without compromising identity. From this point of view, difference is inherently neither good nor bad, only disconcerting; and its expression cannot be constrained by rules prohibiting any actions that threaten a positive valuation of difference.

Conclusions

From this comparison of pluralism and tolerance in action, we can draw the following conclusions. First, we learn that a core distinction between pluralism and tolerance is the decision to view religious diversity as a positive thing or as simply an inescapable fact. This distinction influences programming choices in interfaith organizations, determining how differences and commonalities are presented and valued in relation to each other. In a pluralist approach such as that of IFYC, difference is to some degree peripheral and privatized, while the real action occurs in shared space doing shared activities. Commonality is consistently emphasized over difference. In a tolerant approach such as that of CEDAR, the reverse is true. Difference is central, and it features prominently in the cognitive, experiential, and affective dimensions of learning. The things we have in common with other humans are as peripheral to the summer school experience as the 50 percent of our DNA that we share with a banana.[28] The construction of activities, the locations, and above all the rules governing participants’ behavior are all dependent on whether the program’s underlying philosophy is pluralism or tolerance.

This in turn shapes how participants in the interfaith program understand and engage with difference as they return to their daily lives. Do they see encounters with diversity as something out of the ordinary, something rare but with a positive impact? Or do they see diversity as an ordinary feature of everyday life, which can be engaged either positively or negatively but cannot be ignored? What value do participants assign to differences, as opposed to commonalities, when they encounter someone from another religion in their lives? Does difference or commonality take precedence? The goal of the programs is to give participants the tools to navigate the diversity of their own communities, and the pluralist toolbox looks quite different from the tolerance toolbox. Which one is more effective depends heavily on the context in which it is used. In an environment where religious differences can easily—and temporarily—be subordinated to commonalities, IFYC’s pluralist approach is viable. In an environment where religion is a defining feature of multiple groups’ identities, however, religious difference may not be so easily hidden away as valuable but ultimately irrelevant to public life. CEDAR’s tolerant approach allows fellows to recognize the significance of religious (and other forms of) differences in both public and private life, and to practice living with diversity even if it makes them uncomfortable.

Put simply, a college campus is not Bosnia; the strategies that work for students at the University of Illinois will not directly translate to a neighborhood in Sarajevo. The pluralist toolbox takes for granted that those involved value diversity as an inherent good, which may not always be the case. Yet when such a position is the case, tolerance alone may miss opportunities for constructive action across lines of difference that a pluralist approach would provide. Both approaches, in short, can be effective if they are implemented in the appropriate contexts. What the pluralist approach misses, though, is that diversity is rarely seen as an inherent good. In reality, diversity is more often seen as a threat, precisely because of the danger it poses to group identity.

There is, then, an evangelistic component to the pluralist approach, the success of which directly impacts the effectiveness of any pluralist interfaith enterprise. Those involved must first be convinced that diversity is—or at least can be—a good thing. “Better Together” is not a descriptive statement, but an argument IFYC continually makes through its activities. In its literature, IFYC claims that its notion of pluralism is sociological, not theological; that is, diversity can be understood as socially positive even if it is still seen as theologically negative. In reality, the two are not so easily separated. The move to separate theological pluralism from sociological pluralism is akin to permitting the expression of difference but prohibiting any kind of proselytism: the result is that sincere theological reservations about difference are privatized, and a homogeneous “sociological” point of view regarding difference is imposed publicly. Tolerance does not make this sort of demand, and it is this feature of tolerance that makes it an option worth pursuing as a strategy for maintaining peace in religiously diverse communities. It is not a bad thing for pluralists to plead their case that diversity is positive, but they should never take it for granted that others will agree. Pluralism is the preferred option only if we truly believe that we can create a consensus that diversity is good. However, if we recognize that differences essential to identity and diversity have as much potential to be threatening as to be positive, we may be better off pursuing tolerance, accepting diversity as simply a fact of life that will elicit a wide range of responses. Demanding a positive evaluation of difference can be asking too much; simply recognizing that difference exists may enable us to live together.

Author Bio

Lauren R. Kerby, a 2013 BSSRPL Fellow, is a third-year PhD student at Boston University where she studies contemporary American religion and society.

Bibliography

CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion: www.cedarnetwork.org.

Durkheim, Emile. Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes. New York: The Free Press, 1933/1982.

Erikson, Kai. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. Needham Heights, MA: Macmillan, 1966.

Interfaith Youth Core: www.ifyc.org.

McKim, Robert. “Responding to Religious Diversity: Some Possible Directions for the Interfaith Youth Core.” Journal of College & Character 11:1 (February 2010): 1–8.

Patel, Eboo. Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Soul of a Generation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.

Patel, Eboo, and Cassie Meyer. “The Civic Relevance of Interfaith Cooperation for Colleges and Universities.” Journal of College & Character 12:1 (February 2011): 1–9.

Patel, Eboo, and Cassie Meyer. “Defining Religious Pluralism: A Response to Professor Robert McKim.” Journal of College & Character 11:2 (May 2010): 1–4.

Patel, Eboo, and Cassie Meyer. “Engaging Religious Diversity on Campus: The Role of Interfaith Leadership.” Journal of College & Character 10:7 (November 2009): 1–8.

Seligman, Adam. “Tolerance, Tradition, and Modernity.” Cardozo Law Review 24 (2002): 1645–1657.

Seligman, Adam. “Living Together Differently.” Cardozo Law Review 30 (2008): 2881–2897.

Notes

Fixing the House: The Challenge of Tolerating the “Other” in Public and in Private

Maja Šoštarić

“Imagine that a rat somehow enters your house. What do you do? Essentially, you have two options. One is to kill the rat. Another one is to fix the house.”
(Indonesian kyai – Islamic scholar, during a visit to a pesantren – an Islamic boarding school)

I have witnessed many an interesting, bizarre, or even tragicomic scene during my two-years work in Bosnia focusing on transitional justice. Coming from neighboring Croatia, I have always found the Bosnian mentality somewhat similar to my own. Yet, the Bosnian sarcastically painted sense of humor is something unique that cannot be found anywhere else in the Balkans. I deem it to be by far the best tool for accurately portraying some truths regarding the country’s perplexing political situation, like that scene from Danis Tanović’s 2001 Oscar-winning movie where a Serb and a Bosniak, trapped in an improvised bunker between the opposing armies, quarrel over who started the war, although they might die under a sniper any minute. But eventually, it’s not the sniper that kills them, but their own haggling.

One real-life scene from my professional life in Bosnia is a case in point. During a public debate, a Bosniak, a Croat, and a Serb shared their deeply moving war stories of hunger, torture, and detention, recognized the suffering of the other sides and talked about reconciliation and coexistence. This was indeed something new for the audience present in a packed room on a chilly winter day. The international community must have been very content, for the “value-for-money” ratio finally looked larger than one.

Yet there is another side to the coin, as there always is. Immediately following the debate, I was fortunate to sit down for a cup of tea with the abovementioned three gentlemen, who were smiling to each other, to me, and to the rest of the world. No surprise, then, that I was enormously taken aback to discover, with the stage lights down and off the record, that these three men did not agree on virtually anything. One of them claimed to have been detained in a camp of which another man was denying the mere existence, and the third man was supporting the argument of the second one. As loyal followers of Balkan movies will have guessed, I left them cursing at each other and yelling, all at the same time. (I only heard, from a safe distance, that it was something about you, us, them.)

Is peacebuilding, therefore, just a colorful circus show, a never-ending performance to make believers of those who choose to believe? Is, by extension, tolerance (and hence intolerance as well) something that is exclusively reserved for the private realm, at least in the Western liberal intellectual tradition?[i]  If that is the case, we are very much facing the rat problem mentioned in the caption. What follows from that argument, then, is that the house should be fixed. The first step to proceed, if we think more about the kyai’s valuable advice quoted in the above epigraph, is to identify the hole through which the rat squeezed in, also allowing for the fact that the problem does not have geographical, cultural or social borders: any society can be seen as a house, and any type of intolerance as a rat.

These thoughts were on my mind as the bus I was traveling on this summer stopped in front of a mosque and a church – not one after another, but in fact, one next to another. In the Yogyakarta province, Indonesia, a mosque and a Protestant church share the same address. I was on the bus full of curious minds from all over the world. The bus has just arrived in front of the church and the mosque in order to obtain an insight into how local Muslims and Christians coexist peacefully. The persons on the bus have all read something about the numerous interreligious clashes and disputes in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, whereby the Muslims and all others also coexist with several Islamic subgroups not associated with or recognized by the majority of Indonesia’s Muslims.[ii]

Moreover, we have all heard stories about the Indonesian constitution that foresees six official religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism) to one of which everyone has to belong, and where atheists, or those who refuse to declare their religion, are severely punished. But when one is in the country, stories like that are difficult to believe, judging from the smiling faces around every corner. Therefore, one cannot help but wonder whether the Indonesian people, similarly to the Bosnians and pretty much everyone else on the planet, sometimes only perform.

By performing, of course, I do not mean theater as much as life. But the metaphor of performance found applicability while watching with others the Ramayana ballet in Prambanan Temple in central Java. The content and structure of the performance finds parallels in how one makes sense of “fixing the house.” A traditional Javenese ballet, it is based on the prominent epic and performed in four acts, or, as they call it, episodes. But, the reader is now wondering, how does the ballet play out along the public-private debate? Does the message it conveys and the way it is performed tell us something more about tradition, tolerance and violence?  In the first episode, the main hero, Rama’s wife Shinta, is abducted by Rama’s most bitter adversary, Rahwana. In the second episode, Rama, helped by Sugriwa, the ape envoy, is trying to reach Shinta, while in the third episode Rahwana is already waging a war against Rama. Rama kills Rahwana in episode four, and, of course, reunites with Shinta, and they live happily ever after.

So let the story of tolerance in private versus public (in Bosnia, Indonesia, and everywhere else) and about a summer school that has the rare courage to address the issue (in private and in public), be told in four episodes as well, for the author of these lines still naïvely, but passionately, believes in happy endings.

Episode 1: ISSRPL – Locating the Problem

The curious minds hopping off a bus are the participants of the 2012 International Summer School of Religion and Public Life (ISSRPL) held on two Indonesian islands: Java, being the majority Muslim area, and Bali, being populated mainly by Hindus. By bringing together an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous group of participants (28 fellows from 18 countries) to a country that is equally ethnically and religiously mixed, the school organizers aimed to create small “communities of trust,” as the school director, Boston University professor Adam Seligman, puts it.

Generally, the summer school involves approximately 25-30 fellows coming from about 20 different countries. The yearlong discussion on tolerance and living together differently was started in the Balkans, where, as pointed out in the introduction, it is still a very delicate issue. The first ISSRPL was held in 2003 in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Dubrovnik, Croatia, followed by other Balkan-located schools in 2004 (Sarajevo and Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina), 2006 (Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Boston, United States) and 2011 (Sofia and Plovdiv, Bulgaria). The logo of the school is also closely related to the Balkans: it represents a design of the Čaršijska Mosque in Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was destroyed in 1992-93 and reconstructed in 2003.

Through an intense degree of interaction, and combining cognitive (academic) and emotional aspects, the ISSRPL fellows learn about the country they find themselves in, but also about the people with whom they spend the bulk of their time: other participants of the school. Building on the premises that knowledge is collective (social) and that people build real, active communities (something that is deeply anchored in human nature) by doing together.

Unlike most programs in interreligious and interethnic dialogue, the summer school does not stress what we have in common with the other, but accepts and attempts to build precisely on our differences. That is a challenging undertaking, vastly avoided or at least ignored, precisely because difference is the root of every conflict, be it difference in standpoints, provenance, religion, or levels of wealth. Focusing on the root of conflict is, doubtless, the most targeted way to solve it. By the similar token, addressing difference in the context of the contrast-painted societies is probably also the most efficient method of dealing with difference.

Episode 2: Telling Them What They Want to Hear – a Recipe for Tolerance?

Back to the curious minds from the beginning. Similarly to the ape envoy from Ramayana, they are far from listless and drifting. In the next scene, we see them in a Protestant church, holding some pink lunchbox gifts, eating oranges and listening to the pastor. She is telling them how they, the Christians, have absolutely no problems with their Muslim neighbors. And the Muslim neighbors, who invite everyone to the mosque, concur. All is well, thank you for asking. Yogyakarta has been declared, according to some survey, the happiest city in Indonesia. And according to some other survey, Indonesia, the presenters hurry to add, is indeed the happiest place on the planet. Hence, Logical Reasoning 101 suggests: Yogyakarta is the happiest city on Earth! Some of the curious minds are immediately frowning, and we should forgive them, for doubt is the ultimate quality of those being curious. The question that imposes itself is: could it be that this is just an appearance, something similar to the introductory show performed by my three Bosnian peacebuilding friends? The group leaves in a state of doubt.

A Balinese intellectual gives them an opposite perspective, in a lecture held in a heavenly resort with palms, pools and all other predictable requisites of paradise, in Ubud, Bali. “The tourist heaven you see here”, he points out, “is nothing but the way we make our living. In reality, it’s completely different. Look around. See for yourselves.” The group does just that, trying not to be deceived by the fabulous odor of the yellow plumeria flowers which can be found all over the island. And indeed, truth is out there, as the “X Files”, a TV show popular in the 1990s, suggests. At times, it seems that the Balinese identity, with everything offered for sale, has been constructed merely for purposes of the tourist.[iii]

In a Javanese Catholic church, a priest, looking and speaking like a textbook example of Christ’s shepherd, gives a memorable Sunday sermon. Essentially, he speaks about three people: Udin, a journalist of a local newspaper in Yogyakarta who was probably killed by a politician whom he had associated to corruption; Marsinah, a female worker, who was murdered after she had led a mass labor protest against the corporative owner where she worked. The case was closed without any decision by the court; and Munir, a human rights activist who was poisoned on a flight by military secret agents. Udin, Marsinah and Munir are today’s prophets, the priest concludes, for they were ready to suffer in order to make this imperfect world a better place for the rest of us.

The core of the problem lies exactly in the public sphere. The reason why the honest and profound Bosnian reconciliation process so far has not translated from the public to the private, and vice versa, and why some people in Indonesia publically insist on impeccable harmony within society, while human rights violations still occur in suspicious and dodgy corners far away from sun and the sea, is the inability to grasp the very concept of tolerance, whom one should tolerate, and where. Tolerance “involves accepting, and abiding or accommodating views that one rejects. It calls us to live in cognitive dissonance and presents contradiction as a sought after goal. We are obliged to “bear” what in fact we find unbearable.”[iv]

Often times, tolerance is confounded with indifference – an elegant solution that is based on the premise that a realm of privacy is not to be broached at any cost, and that therefore, tolerant or intolerant views should be removed from public discussion. This is where the issue of space becomes pivotal, too. At home, we think what we want to think, and we say what we want to say, because we are free. Outside, in public, we do not really care (What is there to be tolerant about when it comes to Aborigines if I reside in Buenos Aires? Why on Earth do I have to have an opinion on the Tutsi, or even, God forbid, empathize with them, if I live in Montenegro?), or, in the best of cases, we pretend to care while simultaneously acting completely opposite. That, or so we seem to be taught, is the way to achieve world peace and to coexist with the “other”.

Episode 3: Tolerating vs. Confronting the “Other”

Then, again, who is your “other”? The “other” is obviously not a Tutsi from Kigali if you have spent all your life in Podgorica. On the contrary, it is someone who enters your own, private, comfort zone. The “other” is precisely that person claiming to have been detained in a camp that “your” army set up. The “other” is that Christian building a church in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood; the “other” is also a Jew in Bosnia, where he or she cannot actively engage in politics, or a Jewish observant in Indonesia, where he or she cannot tick a box which says “Judaism” on an ID card, for there is no such category; the “other” is a Muslim in the Paris banlieues or the London outskirts; the “other” is a Chinese on the island of Java, who has never learned to write or to speak Chinese, but has also never really been accepted as an Indonesian; the “other”, too, is that annoying human rights activist who does not stop reminding the world of child labor in your fabric. It seems that the world has plenty of “others”!

Deranged dictators and their policies (though not only) are, as a rule, obsessed with “otherness”. Hitler’s Endlösung (Final Solution) had the objective of exterminating every single Jew in Germany, and then beyond. Saddam’s gassing campaigns during Anfal targeted helpless Kurds in selected areas of Iraq, and Milošević’s insane policy of etničko čišćenje (ethnic cleansing) was systematically conducted against non-Serbs in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. Throughout Indonesia, in 1965, everyone was suspected to be a Communist and as a consequence, thousands of innocent people died. Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, went so far as to kill all the people wearing glasses, for they were deduced to be intellectuals, and therefore enemies of the Angkor, the civilization of Kampuchea established by Pol Pot.

Africa, too, is not spared of such abominable stories. Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis was, similarly to what happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina, replete with cases of war rape, with the scope of humiliating the opponent to the core. Moreover, Uganda’s infamous fugitive Joseph Kony has committed unthinkable atrocities leading the ironically named rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (previously also dubbed the Holy Spirit Movement) and aiming to establish a state based on the Ten Commandments. The ongoing crises in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are closely related to this issue.

Punishing “otherness” can also occur in a less brutal manner, of course. Recently an American Muslim in Lombok, Indonesia, was sentenced to five months for religious defamation because during Ramadan in 2012, he pulled out the plug on a mosque’s loudspeaker claiming that the loud voice disrupted the guests at his guesthouse.[v] Likewise, “others” are in many cases held at a safe distance. For instance, the Palestinian people in Bethlehem cannot exit their town, secluded by a wall, and go and visit relatives in Jerusalem, only 8.5 kilometers away, without an official Israeli authorization that is extremely rarely granted. Similarly, Bosniak people in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, have not been to the Croat part of the city for more than twenty years and vice versa. Moreover, both Bosniaks and Croats also swear they will never do so, ever.

Episode 4: Knowledge of vs. Knowledge for Tolerance

But where does this discussion lead us? Now, imagine the group consisting of a Ugandan Catholic, an Indonesian Pentecostal, a Zimbabwean Anglican, a Bosnian Muslim, an Afghani Muslim, an Indonesian Hindu, an American Jew, and a Croatian Catholic. These people all carry along certain views of those who are “other” to them. Perhaps they think of these others as dangerous; perhaps they are skeptical about them; perhaps they see them with a nuance of neutrality, even indifference, when not in direct contact with them. In any case, there is always a certain level of mistrust in interacting with the “other.” Learning about the “other” in an academic way is useful, but it is only the part of the process (Seligman calls this “knowledge of”).

The most distinctive premise of the school, however, is to link this “knowledge of” with an even more precious form of knowledge: “knowledge for.” Imagine a long day of lectures on the Indonesian constitution or Balinese identity; visits to the Merapi volcano by motorcycle, the breathtaking Prambanan, a collection of 240 Hindu temples, or the Kotesan Buddhist village in Java; or worships like the Jewish Shabbat prayer, the Muslim Juma’t Prayer, the mass in the Javanese Catholic church, or the Shiwa Buddha tooth-filing ceremony in the midst of the rice fields of Bali.

After such a full day, when the abovementioned group of people, heterogeneous in everything one can be heterogeneous in – age, gender, race, religion, language, and built-in conceptions of what is acceptable and normal – has dinner together, dances together, sings on a bus, goes to swim, or cooks together, they necessarily build a closer community. They have shared experiences (for they have just returned from a long day and there is a lot to talk about), and they become more open to talk about some more personal issues, such as conflict, belonging and identity. That is, then, the “knowledge for.”

One particular moment that struck this author and which instantiated all that was said thus far, revolves around a young woman, whose provenance I will not disclose for her own safety, and who is the most impressive person I met during the ISSRPL in Indonesia. Young as she is, she leads an unthinkable life for the majority of us participating in the school, some even more than twice as old as she is. Her life consists in constant fear: how will she get to university? What will happen with her and her sister? Is somebody she knows going to get beaten up or killed? She has been trying for several years to set up educational programs for women in her country’s rural areas, facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles and risking her life on a daily basis.

And in the midst of Bali, the hallucinating paradise, something entirely unplanned happens: the young woman suddenly breaks into tears. And what follows, to me, is the core of the ISSRPL: Muslims, Jews, and Christians from all over the world sit still and listen to the girl’s sobbing. No one is trying to console the young woman with some wise words, proverbs and catchy phrases. Importantly, no one is trying to say: “You know, I understand you, for what is/was done to my people is equally bad”. The only gesture coming from all those present, the Muslims, Jews, and Christians, is that of silence, gradually turning into many tears. Certainly, no one was being tolerant in relation to the girl, for there was nothing to tolerate, given no geographical or historical connection between our realities and her quagmire. But, equally, no one was being indifferent. That is the point where empathy jumps in, or, as Dominique Moïsi has so wonderfully put it, the “geopolitics of emotion.”[vi]

That is, in brief, also what the experience of the ISSRPL teaches us. You actually do not have to tolerate your distant “others”, those you do not live with or are not connected to in any way, because their behavior does not affect you. But you can at least try, once in a while, to see the world from their shoes, and compare to what you see from yours. It is a refreshing experience. And that is exactly what happens when you have some forty people from all over the world discussing the limits of power of Yogyakarta’s sultan under a tree just next to the Prambanan temple.

The near “others”, on the other hand, are a more challenging group to deal with. Not only do you have to try to understand what they are going to do next, but you also have to tolerate them (as much in private as in public, in order for the concept of tolerance to really work) so you can all coexist peacefully. When the ISSRPL fellows go back to their countries of origin, this second, much bigger, challenge immediately arises. One thing is certain: You do not merely study the “other” like you study country flags, Amazonian vegetation, or architectural styles. Much more is at stake. You live with the “other”, acknowledge the differences between that other and yourself, and learn to accept them. It is, indeed, astonishingly simple, and, what is more, it guarantees the “happily ever after” ending. The house is safe; the rats will not return.

All that said, I have to note that normally I am genuinely disinclined to appreciate the texts ending with a verse, or, even worse, a whole strophe. It is just so cliché. But, wishing to leave the confused reader with something tangible, or at least memorable, after hearing a whole lot about tolerance, Ramayana, Indonesia, Bosnia, rats, the problem of otherness, and in particular, the ISSRPL that assembled all those puzzle pieces together into a beautiful mélange, I will close with a poem, for a simple reason. I do not believe that anyone has ever made such a powerful point in fewer words than this particular maestro, on why tolerance is a matter of sheer necessity:

The blood, the soil, the faith
These words you can’t forget
Your vow, your holy place
O love, aren’t you tired yet?

(…)A cross on every hill
A star, a minaret
So many graves to fill
O love, aren’t you tired yet?
–Leonard Cohen, The Faith

Rejecting Utopias, Embracing Modesty: Reflections on Interreligious Peacebuilding in Light of the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life

James W. McCarty, III

My field of study, Christian Social Ethics, is a child of the “Social Gospel” movement.[i] At its best, this movement represents the incredible possibilities of constructive and theologically informed Christian political engagement toward the creation of a just society. At its worst, it represents the worst of religious social thought: the utopian dreams of naïve people whose religious vision of a perfect society impeded their work for a good one.[ii] Like many others influenced by Enlightenment beliefs about human potential, some Social Gospellers believed that humanity was evolving into a more moral race and was coming into its final stages of development. This dream quickly became a nightmare in the wake of two world wars and the attempted extermination of European Jewry. Advances in technology did not coincide with advances in morality. Rather, they made it possible for the modern phenomenon known as “genocide” to come into existence.

On the other end of the spectrum, for nearly a century people were predicting the global decline of religion. People proclaimed “the death of God” and forecast the rise of a global secularism, understood as the disappearance of religion from public life. Those who were wiser cautioned against such bold claims, but the mainline story for decades was that religion was “on the ropes” and had nearly zero chance of long-term survival. Today we know that such predictions were naïve and pompous. The significance of religion in global public life seems, to people in the West, to have increased exponentially over the last decade. Of course, the importance of religion was never in decline, we often simply chose to ignore its untraditional manifestations. The utopian vision of a “secular” society liberated from religion seems like nothing more than a fairy tale in today’s world.

Finally, many liberals, devoted to social justice and peacemaking around the world, continue to spread the often offensive untruth that “all religions are really the same” or that “at the heart of every religion is love and justice and peace and, therefore, we should all just get along.” They gloss over real and significant differences between religious and theological traditions in order to proclaim a false universalism and surface unity between the religions.  We have seen over and over that people are often willing to die and kill over those seemingly “trivial” differences liberals want to ignore. They pursue the solidarity of religious traditions through the categories of liberalism and, therefore, fail to do justice to both the great religious traditions and the project of liberalism. The utopian hope of all faiths leading up the same mountain is dashed every time someone refuses to climb the aforementioned mountain.

Utopias are exciting and we want to believe them. They give us a goal to work toward and an energizing spirit that inspires masses of people. Utopias sustain us when reality causes others to despair. However, utopias are false dreams that eventually shatter when people attempt to implement them in history because they must eventually exclude those who do not buy into or fit neatly into the vision. Liberalism is one such utopia, and Communism is another, and both have been party to some of history’s most egregious crimes. They were the leading political visions of the bloodiest century on record.

In contrast, the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life (ISSRPL) embodies a pedagogy of modesty. Rejecting all utopias, the ISSRPL pursues tolerance, shared practices, recognized and embraced differences, and the admission of religious, theological, and ethical ambiguity rather than purity in communal religious life. Perhaps the most important form of modesty practiced by ISSRPL, however, is its refusal to claim to know any final answer to the complex question of how to make and sustain peace in a religiously plural world. The school is an experiment as much as it is anything, and while there may be tentative theories being explored, the results of the experiment are not yet clear. Focusing on the lived experience of religion in various contexts, the school challenges and complicates the “neat” pictures of public life theorists like John Rawls and Karl Marx present. Public life is not just “political life” in a narrow sense. Religious life is public life as well.

An Example of What is Possible

Bulgaria is a country that has passed through centuries of Orthodox Christian hegemony, five hundred years of Ottoman rule, decades of a Communist regime, and is now in the early stages of a liberal democratic society. Now, imagine if you will an Orthodox Christian monastery in Bulgaria that is home to one young monk. This monastery was built over a century ago by a Muslim man whose Muslim wife found healing at a nearby spring of healing water tied by legend to the traditional Orthodox faith of the country. Today this monastery houses a very old icon which has a special miraculous power: it provides healing to women who have been unable to conceive. Many women come and pray before this icon every year and find healing for their barren wombs. Christian women pray before this icon. Muslim women pray before this icon. This occurs in a country where churches were destroyed and converted into mosques which were centuries later converted back into churches. This, in a land where Turkish-Muslims were exiled to Turkey, and Bulgarian-Muslims were forced to have their names changed into “Christian” ones as recently as the 1980’s.

In a land with centuries of ebbing religious conflict, how does such a place as this monastery exist? On the one hand, it is a miracle. On the other hand, it is very simple: Christians and Muslims share something there. They share a history, a holy relic, and a practice of healing. Through times of strife throughout the rest of the country people of various religious backgrounds have come to pray before this miraculous icon. They have shared life’s pain and joy, at least, in this one place, and it has survived conflicts between religions and the Communist attempt to eliminate religion.

In this space questions of theology are not asked, Holy Scriptures are not compared and contrasted with one another, and no attempts at conversion are made. People from various religious backgrounds simply share in a practice that gives life. They go away from their shared practice different but not converted. Rather, they allow the space to be what it is—a shared space of life-giving practices—and do not trouble that space with the conflicts that sometimes rage outside.

However, that space is not wholly “public,” and outside that space conflicts still occur quite frequently. ISSRPL exists to discover if there are some other shared public practices that can create the space for tolerance. It is an experiment of which no one yet seems to know the results.

What is ISSRPL?

ISSRPL is an experiment, a “laboratory,” in which scholars and activists of interreligious peacebuilding from around the globe travel to some place in the world with a history of religious conflicts and live together for two weeks. During this time they eat meals together, study together, sightsee together, witness each other’s worship services, and even do “yoga” together. Throughout these two weeks a multitude of conversations and key events occur. For instance, imagine Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians from Bulgaria, Uganda, and Indonesia singing “Amazing Grace” while American Jews and Bosnian Muslims cheer them on. Or, imagine a heated debate about Muslim women wearing headscarves in which a Muslim woman makes it clear she will not remove her scarf because “it is part of who she is.” In response, a Christian man says, “You weren’t born with it on your head,” to which a secular Jewish woman enthusiastically cheers. Both of these instances happened within hours of each other at the 2011 ISSRPL.  This is life at the ISSRPL.

The Principles of the ISSRPL

There are several key principles and assumptions under which the ISSRPL functions. The first is that the dominant models in contemporary political philosophy, liberalism and communitarianism, are inadequate models for making sense of religious plurality and establishing a sustainable peace. Adam Seligman, the founder of the school, said, “[One] purpose of the school is to understand the implications of different political models.”[iii] One implication of both of these dominant models is that they are inadequate in the face of increasing religious diversity. They both assume a certain type of hegemony, of the individual or the traditional community, which inevitably excludes certain religious persons from ever being able to be full members of such a political community. They both create “others” that can never be wholly integrated. Rather than attempt to perfect one of these inherently flawed models, the school is an experiment in creating a third way between them.

A second key assumption is that “part of living together is bearing one’s own discomfort.”[iv] In other words, there are differences that cannot be transcended and these differences will sometimes, if not oftentimes, make us uncomfortable. For instance, I am uncomfortable when I see a woman wearing a burqa; in fact, I find it hard to fathom how enforcing this practice is anything other than a form of oppression of women. In a like manner I cannot count the number of times I have had Muslim women insist to me that women in the West are oppressed because they are forced to adhere to standards of beauty and sexual vibrancy that distract from their intelligence and spiritual strength to be successful. The dress of women in the West is truly offensive to their social, religious, and moral sensibilities. However, this does not mean that we cannot live with one another in a way in which we respect, or at best tolerate, our differences without either of us “accepting” them. More importantly, this does not mean that we cannot live together without eventually wanting to kill one another even if we never accept all of each other’s practices.

This is a third core principle of the school: tolerance is not “too low” a virtue to be the goal of interreligious peacebuilding. It is popular today to dismiss tolerance as an inadequate goal for social life because it implies a “distaste” for another’s way of life and, therefore, we should move beyond tolerance to acceptance or the celebration of differences. The school takes as one of its starting points the exact opposite stance. Just as human rights best function as a “floor” or “basement” for our social life rather than some unattainable “ceiling,” we should strive for tolerance because that is the best we can achieve in a world in which religious differences are often not simply a matter of “taste” but have significant moral and social implications. There is a high likelihood that one’s religious (and political) beliefs and practices are highly offensive to someone else. One part of social life is that we live with people who offend us. Striving to live as if this is not so is another utopia that is bound to disappoint. Rather, if we could simply tolerate those who offend us and make us uncomfortable we will have taken an important first step towards a sustainable peace.

One way in which this discomfort is borne by everyone in the school is by attending one another’s religious services. Witnessing the worship of another person can be a jarring experience. We are reminded of the different ways that we each pray to our God and that we inhabit different religious and moral worlds. While there are always places of contact where some commonality can be found, those points of commonality do not remove or transcend our differences. The differences always remain and must be tolerated if they cannot be accepted.

An important part of such tolerance, for the ISSRPL, is the willingness to live together under the assumption that no one people group—religious, ethnic, national, or racial—has a monopoly on suffering. In other words, no one in the school can claim the suffering of their people as a trump card to end the hard work of attempting to live together through offense and injury.[v] This is, perhaps, the most difficult principle of the school as there are often people in the school who come from places where the rhetoric of “greater suffering” of one group versus another is a daily reality. It is easy to view the goal of tolerance as a cynical one that refuses to move past “petty” offenses, but when one remembers that peacebuilding is not necessarily about how to live peacefully with your annoying next door neighbor but, rather, how to live peacefully with the person who stole your family’s land or how to ride the bus with the person whose brother killed your daughter, we are reminded of how difficult interreligious peacebuilding can be.

The learning that happens in being physically present in the worship of another or in suppressing the desire to claim one’s suffering as a trump card is fundamentally different than the learning that happens when reading an essay on prayer or reading about the suffering in your enemy’s history. This type of learning impacts us beyond some form of generalized knowledge[vi] about the other by forcing one to learn what it means to physically remain in relationship with one whose words or life are at times offensive. This is why the ISSRPL places such an emphasis on embodied pedagogy.[vii]

Finally, the school assumes that over two weeks of living, studying, and working together the group of between thirty and forty well-intentioned people of goodwill will “splinter.” Some event will occur that drives a wedge between certain members of the group. All that we have discussed before is tested in this experience. Can we practice tolerance in the midst of real offense and injury? Inevitably, it seems, the group recovers from this experience and comes back together to live together in a tolerant community. What is it that enables this to happen? This, it seems, is the yet unanswered question. In the year I was part of the school it was drawing upon some of the core principles of Western liberal individualism that brought the group back together. I gathered from conversations that in previous years it was a commitment to some form of communitarianism that brought the group back together after strife. However, neither of these alone is sufficient for the enterprise. The question of the school is, “What is the third way between these two dominant political models that the school is uncovering in its annual practice?”

Embracing Modesty

Out of my experience with the ISSRPL I have learned three key lessons for thinking about interreligious peacebuilding: first, dialogue is insufficient to establish peace; instead, shared practice, even public rituals, are necessary to sustain any peace begun through dialogue or political policy; second, interreligious peacebuilding is risky and there is never any guarantee that an achieved peace will last; third, we must embrace theological, political, and embodied modesty and reject the pursuit of utopias.

One of the most common responses to religious diversity and conflict is to promote interreligious dialogue. In these settings people of different faiths come together and talk about their religious beliefs with one another. Members of one religion teach members of another religion about their holidays, theological commitments, and forms of worship. Oftentimes, the purpose of such sessions is to dispel rumors about a religion or answer “hard questions.” While such dialogue is helpful in introducing people who may not otherwise cross paths to one another, and serves as a type of “icebreaker” between communities, it is insufficient to establish a sustainable peace. The knowledge gained at this level of engagement is still too abstract and general to sustain peace. Rather, people must share life together.[viii] Some form of shared practice—perhaps as simple as sharing a regular meal[ix]—is necessary for people to move beyond seeing those of another religion as a “generalized other.”[x] Practices are concrete, and sharing practices is a an embodied experience that makes it harder to act as if the one you share such a practice with is not a human in the same way you are a human.[xi] It is ritual that sustains religious communities during times of theological strife, and it will take some form of publicly shared ritual between religious communities to sustain any understanding or peace that is achieved through dialogue. “Ideal speech situations” do not exist in reality. In reality what we have are embodied persons who share space with other embodied persons. Shared practices and rituals create an embodied knowledge that simply cannot be achieved through dialogue, no matter how “ideal” it is.

In addition, no matter how much dialogue occurs or how many practices are shared, there is never a guarantee that today’s peace will last tomorrow. Peacebuilding is always risky.[xii] In response to this reality, the ISSRPL emphasizes “trust.”[xiii] It claims that with modernity we have had to learn to live in danger. More often than not we have responded to this danger with practices of exclusion, othering, and violence. In traditional communities there is no need to “trust” anyone because you can have “confidence” in them. Everyone you encounter is a person like you—from the same family or tribe—but with the rise of the modern age we began to live with strangers. You can never be confident about how a stranger will react to your action or even your being. Living amongst strangers seems to be an inherently dangerous situation. In this situation, if we want to live peacefully, we must trust our stranger-neighbor with no guarantee that they will not harm us. Thus, every attempt at living peacefully with those who are “other” is a risky endeavor. [xiv] To pursue a worthwhile end we must always take risks. Our attempts at life-sustaining moral action are never guaranteed success. Too often people refuse to act without the confidence that their actions will achieve their intended results; they do not engage people without knowing they will be respected and treated appropriately. However, if we only welcome others when we are sure our hospitality will be reciprocated we become slaves to our individual prejudices and fears and of our society’s generalized stereotypes of those who are our strangers. To create peace we must be willing to trust people who offend us and make us uncomfortable. It is for this reason that peacebuilding is always a risky endeavor.

Finally, we must embrace what Adam Seligman calls “epistemological modesty”[xv] and Ellen Ott Marshall calls “theological humility.”[xvi] We must be willing to admit we do not have a monopoly on the truth if we are ever to achieve a lasting peace that includes those who are “not like us.” One can claim to know the whole truth and maintain a certain form of peace in a homogenous and hegemonic community, but in a plural society one must always make “modest claims.”[xvii] We must make modest and humble claims—and have modest goals—because bold claims too quickly become utopian justifications to continue the cycle of violence that plagues our world. The most terrible crimes and human rights abuses of the twentieth century—genocides in Europe, Asia, and Africa, constant and protracted warfare, decades of Apartheid rule in South Africa, the use of “disappearances” in Latin America, international terrorism—were all committed in the name of political, ethnic, and religious utopias. Some of history’s greatest atrocities have been motivated by humanity’s highest ideals. The remedy for such overzealous violence is modesty.

One of the leading causes of violence is the notion of “purity.” The pursuit of ethnic and religious purity, especially, has served as a justification for violence against all who may be potential “pollutants.” One way in which we learn to embrace modesty and reject utopias is through sharing spaces and practices with one another. For example, the monastery mentioned earlier is a shared space that both Muslims and Christians in Bulgaria have an interest in preserving because they share practices there. In a similar manner, there is a small community in Macedonia in which Orthodox Christians and Sunni and Shi’a Muslims all celebrate the Day of Saint George at the same shrine. In these celebrations the Christians incorporate some traditionally Macedonian Muslim practices (such as stepping through a string of beads), the Muslims incorporate some traditionally Christian practices (such as giving gifts of eggs dyed red), and they all incorporate traditional Macedonian practices in their celebrations (specifically, the  youth swinging from a rope on a tree).[xviii] They share holiday practices and a holy space and maintain peace while being surrounded by communities that have experienced conflict. While shared spaces and practices are no guarantee of peace, they are a risk that, when taken, opens up the space where trust and peace are viable possibilities.

Conclusion

We live in a world shaped by great ideals and horrific violence. The twentieth century has taught us, if it has taught us anything, that the inevitable outcome of striving for utopian dreams is historically gruesome violence. In response to this, the ISSRPL maintains that we must take modest steps towards religious peace. These steps must be physical and not metaphorical. Politics is impotent to create peace between religious and ethnic groups. Dialogue, while pointing in the right direction, is incapable of sustaining peaceful relations. Perhaps we should return to the lessons of so-called “primitive” or “traditional” religions and communities and create shared practices and rituals that perform peace. Habituation in such practices may be able to form people with the virtue of peacebuilding. And even if we continue to be so different from one another that we still experience discomfort, perhaps we will have enough of the virtue of patience to be able to bear our discomfort. At least, this is what the ISSRPL understands to be its modest claim. And if this happens, maybe we will stop killing each other.