Essay

Comparing_Religions_Coming_to_Terms_----_10_Faithful_Re-readings_Exclusivism_Inclusivism_Pluralism_and_Justice.pdf

Faithful re-readings exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism, and Justice

[T]he King cares little that in allowing everyone to follow [his or her own] religion he was in reality violating all.

A Catholic priest on the religious tolerance of the Indian Mughal Emperor Akbar

If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.

Voltaire, “On the Church of England ” (Letter 5 in Letters Concerning the English Nation)

Chapter Outline

The Task of Theology: Relating Reason and Revelation 306 Ongoing Revelation 306 Revelation and Reason Defined 308 Commentarial Traditions 308 Theology Defined 309 Apologetics and Polemics 309 Comparative Theology 310 Religious Tolerance and Religious Freedom 310 Particularity and Universality 311

Excluding the Other Religious Worldview from One’s Own 313 Strengths and Weaknesses of Exclusivism 314 The Bridge–Bonding Dilemma 314

Including the Other Religious Worldview within One’s Own 315 Inclusivism and Canon Formation 317

Kripal, Jeffrey J., et al. Comparing Religions : Coming to Terms, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucok-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1597992. Created from ucok-ebooks on 2021-04-28 19:10:43.

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On February 20, 1974, the doorbell rang at the California apartment of the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The author was feeling a bit woozy from some sodium pentathol that he had been given at the dentist’s office for an oral surgery earlier that day. A young woman was at the door. She was delivering a packet of painkillers. Dick was struck by her long brown hair, her eyes, and her beauty. He was also attracted to her gold necklace, which featured the fish sign used by the early Christians as a symbol for Christ. “Attracted” may be exactly the right word. Dick’s wife at the time, Tessa Dick, has suggested that he was gazing at the necklace as a stratagem for star- ing down the young woman’s blouse, which sported a “plunging neckline.”1

Breasts or not, this golden symbol that gleamed in the sun triggered something in the author. For the next two months, Dick would find himself passing through a most remarkable series of events, including the appearance of various memories of past lives that caused him to remember. Remember what? “Your celestial origins,” Dick explains, “this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA (phylogenetic memory) … You remember your real nature. Which is to say, origins (from the stars) … You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but you are not of this world.” More specifically, on that

winter day Dick remembered who he really was: a secret Christian living in fear of the Romans in the first century—a space–time dimension, he specu- lated, that was somehow layered over his own space– time dimension, as if they somehow existed all at once, like grooves on a vinyl record, as he once put it (we are reminded of Anita Moorjani’s descriptions of her near-death experience outside of linear time). Such impossible thoughts were fired into his brain by what he calls “a transcendentally rational mind.” He could not help but be reminded of the ancient Christian mystical doctrine of the Logos, the divine Word or cosmic reason, through which all things came to be and which is one with God, which is God. This transcendentally rational mind did more than fire things at him, though. It killed and resurrected him so that he could now also know what he really was: “an immortal being.”2

Dick would go on to write three novels—his last three—about the events of those months before he died eight years later, in 1982. He would also type and scrawl some 8,000 pages of private journal entries now known as The Exegesis, in a vain attempt to recover the meanings of those events through analysis and acts of interpretation. Eventually Dick began to claim that he had been “resynthesized” or “repro- grammed” by a pink beam emanating from a vast

Hindu Tolerance and Hierarchy 317 Strengths and Weaknesses of Inclusivism 318

Encountering the Sacred within and beyond All Religious Worldviews 318 Pluralism Is a Truth Claim 319 Strengths and Weaknesses of Pluralism 320

Comparison Is Justice: Liberation, Black, Feminist, and Queer Theologies 321 Liberation Theology 321 Black Theology 323 Feminist Theology 326 Queer Theology 327 Thinking Justice 330

Nuances: Faith and Scholarship 331 The Tough Questions 331

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super-consciousness that he called VALIS, an acronym for “vast active living intelligence system.”

He made the name up, but he did not make up Valis. Nor did he make up the pink light. Both were autobiographical facts of immense power and immeasurable, really infinite significance. Indeed Valis was so meaningful that Dick could interpret its appearance in his life in a hundred different ways; but every interpretation, every attempt to frame or capture it always found its opposite, or, more weirdly, ended up in another paradox, which looped back on itself within a kind of infinite reflexivity, as in a dou- ble mirror. Somehow Valis remained beyond any single name, interpretation, or reading. It could not be “languaged.” It could not be reasoned.

Not that it didn’t “speak.” This, after all, was a light that beamed into Dick the information-laden energies of entire books. Valis, he came to understand, was

what his life was all about. It was what he had been writing “toward” in all those earlier sci-fi pulps; because he now realized that those were so many pointers toward this. The Robert Jiménez painting reproduced in Figure 10.1 captures beautifully this notion of Dick’s pink revelation from above and the effect it had on his writing, on his words. The fish sign that triggered it all hangs on his hairy chest. His late friend, Bishop James Pike, who helped him to learn about ancient Christian gnosticism and who (Dick suspected) possessed him via the Valis event, hides mysteriously behind the writer’s collar.

None of this, of course, “makes sense”: it is not rational in the simple, secular sense of that word. Which is just to say that whatever Dick experienced cannot be slotted into the working of the world as we normally experience it through our five senses, our logic, and our normal notion or feeling of what is real. And yet it happened. It was real to Dick; indeed Valis was the most real and the most important event of his entire life.

If Dick had been living in a previous era, he would have certainly framed Valis in traditional religious terms—as an angel or a demon, as a god or a goddess, or, more likely, as God—instead of using his own col- orful sci-fi expressions to do it. He would not have written three science-fiction novels to explain it, either. He would have channeled another religious scripture or would have written a commentary on the New Testament, the Torah, or the Upanishads. Actually the latter is more or less what he ended up doing in his private journals: he related his experi- ence of Valis endlessly to the world religions he knew, and especially to the mystical traditions of ancient Greece, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism.

In the end he settled for a position that recognized that the sacred manifests itself in all the religions and yet overflows each of them; that transcendent truths are scattered throughout space and time in the differ- ent religious systems of the planet; that these glowing shards can be located, identified, picked up, and put together into a new revelation by someone imagi- nally empowered (like him); that belief can never

Figure 10.1 A Philip K. Dick Moment (2012), by Robert Jiménez. At zerostreet.com.

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exhaust revelation; and that revelation falls funda- mentally outside and beyond the rules and bound- aries of human reason. Religious revelation, Dick realized, is its own thing, even if it can only “speak” to us in our own thing, that is, in the structures and symbols of cognition and culture.

The Task of Theology: relating reason and revelation

Throughout this textbook we have been emphasizing that the sameness of the religions resides primarily in their functions, not in their content, teachings, or final states of salvation, which are all very different. We can now name these re-readings of religion as instances of functionalism. In the last three chapters we will return to the functionalist models, but we will also turn to those different revelations and to those final states of salvation as ultimate truth claims. We might call these comparisons focused on the truth claims of the religions substantive comparative practices. Such practices are not strictly concerned with the similar functions of religion. They are concerned mostly with the different truth claims of various religions and with how to relate these claims to one another within some larger or global under- standing or theory of religion.

We begin with a sci-fi writer for three reasons. First, Dick’s Valis reminds us that revelation honors and recognizes no distinction between “elite” and “popular” culture. Revelation can take on almost any cultural frame, including the pop-cultural frame of a cheap paperback. Second, we begin with Dick because his brave but finally futile attempt to under- stand Valis illustrates in glowing colors just how deep and vast the abyss can be between the experienced realities of religious revelation and the logical struc- tures of reason. It is this fundamental gap between revelation and reason—mediated, in part, through the symbols and narratives of the religious imagina- tion—that we will repeatedly stress here. Third, we begin with Dick’s Valis because this case powerfully

demonstrates that religious revelation and different states of salvation continue into the present. Such events are by no means things of the past.

ongoing revelation

We have come across this truth before, of course. Here we might recall The Revelation of the Magi, which featured the star-being who proclaims that he is “a ray of light whose light has shone … in the entire world and in every land by unspeakable mysteries.”3 We met this idea again in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who got kicked out of Harvard for suggesting, among other scandalous things, that Christians should stop idolizing the Bible since revelation was an ongoing phenomenon; and again in the poet Walt Whitman, who suggested that all the bibles are shed out of us, like leaves off a tree.

It is worth observing that this “revelation of ongoing revelation” is often extremely problematic for the more conservative forms of religious systems, many of which are heavily invested in the position that revelation does not continue into the present. This is why new revelations, like Mormonism or the Baha’i faith, were vehemently denied by their sur- rounding cultures. When these two movements— Mormonism and the Baha’i faith—emerged in the nineteenth century, both were violently resisted by American Protestant Christians and Iranian Shia Muslims, respectively. The logic of this resistance is not difficult to fathom: if the new revelation is valid, then the older revelation is incomplete and imperfect, something to leave behind.

The Baha’i Religion The case of the Baha’i religion is especially instructive in this regard. In 1844, a young Shia merchant from Shiraz, Persia named Sayyid Ali Muhammad, after going through a number of pro- found religious experiences, announced that the end of the age was near and declared himself to be the “gate” (bab) to the hidden Imam. The latter is the mes- sianic leader who Shia Muslims believe has been in occultation for some twelve hundred years; they await his return at the end of time. Moved by this new

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revelation, the Bab, along with a number of his close confidants, began missionary activities across the Middle East. But this kind of activity stirred up much tension within the Muslim communities. The Bab was summoned and questioned a number of times and eventually imprisoned in 1847, after he refused to denounce his beliefs and declarations about being the Gate of the hidden Imam.

Then, early in 1848, he went further still and announced that he was not the Gate, but the awaited hidden Imam himself. He then declared the abroga- tion or end of Islamic law and announced his desire to replace it by a new social order, which he delin- eated in a book. His disciples followed and began to announce the end of the Islamic era and the inaugu- ration of this new dispensation. This was a radical claim, but it was hardly a new move. In fact it was quite traditional. Recall that this is more or less what the early Christians proclaimed in relation to the Torah or “Old Testament” and what the early Muslims proclaimed in relation to the Torah and the Gospel.

The response from the orthodox was swift and severe. The Bab was executed in July 1850. A period of heavy persecutions and religious violence fol- lowed. After more than a decade of exile, soul search- ing, and disarray in the nascent community, it was a close disciple, Mirza Husain-Ali Nuri, better known as Baha’ullah (“God’s glory”), who announced him- self to be the promised prophet of the new era. A great number of writings from Baha’ullah followed in which he referred to his followers as the “people of Baha.” It was during the last decades of his life (he died in 1892), which he spent in exile in the Ottoman prison city of Akka (in present-day Israel), that Baha’ullah laid the theological foundation for what was later called “the Baha’i religion” or the religion of the followers of Baha’ullah.

The notion of ongoing or progressive revelation often leads to a broadly tolerant understanding of other people’s religions. Accordingly, the writings of Baha’ullah and other Baha’i leaders are emphatic about the unity of all religions (including the Asian ones) and their prophets (including figures like Krishna and the Buddha). From a Baha’i perspective,

all religions, in spite of their historical specificities, originate in the same divine source and carry a sim- ilar message to humanity. The Baha’i faith is believed by its followers to be privileged today not because it is absolutely true and the other religions are false, but because of this very notion of progressive revelation. In other words, in the lineage of prophetic cycles that includes figures like Adam, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad (Platonic orien- talism and the ancient wisdom narrative again), Baha’ullah has brought a religion that belongs to the present prophetic cycle by being the most recent “manifestation of God.” Not that this particular man- ifestation is final, either: even the Baha’i faith itself is subjected to the principle of ongoing revelation. Revelation is never over. God speaks only with commas, never with full stops. There will thus come a time when a new prophet will arise, to usher in a new cycle and to renew the divine message according to the always changing needs of the human race and its increasingly connected “global village.”4

Mormonism Similar notions of ongoing revelation can be found in Mormonism. This new revelation was born in the USA, in upstate New York. in the early decades of the nineteenth century, around a man named Joseph Smith. Smith claimed to have dis- covered, at the direction of a white-robed angel named Moroni, a collection of golden plates buried in a hill near his farm outside of Palmyra, New York. These golden plates recorded the prehistory of the Americas and its peoples, especially two groups called the Nephites and the Lamanites; the latter group, Smith revealed, became the Native Americans of known history.

These ancient civilizations, the revelation went on, were connected to the ancient Israelites of the Bible through the family of Lehi, which left the ancient Near East and traveled to North America in the mid- dle of the first millennium bce. Through such narra- tive means, Joseph Smith’s golden plates drew a direct connection between ancient Israel and the ancient Americas. They proclaimed in effect that a new reve- lation had been made and—just as importantly—that

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there was more to come, since Smith was instructed not to translate all of the plates: some of them were ordained for the future.

Smith claimed that his original discovery of the Plates of Mormon (named after a fourth-century prophet and scribe who compiled the plates) took place on September 21, 1823. In the following years he proceeded to translate a portion of the plates, which became the Book of Mormon. The text was published in 1830.

Smith’s career as a prophet began, however, before all this, with what the Mormon tradition calls “the First Vision” and what we might now recognize as a comparativist crisis. As a young man, he was severely bothered by all the competing denominations and sects of the early United States. According to the tra- ditional account, he wanted to know which one was the correct one. God the Father and his son Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph and gave him a very clear answer: none of them. He was to wait for the true faith, which would soon come.

It did. Such claims were immediately countered by accusa-

tions of intentional fraud that came from many people close to Smith and his family. It was not just the mes- sage of the plates, but their very existence that many doubted; and the skeptics included people like Smith’s own father-in-law, Isaac Hale. When the content of the revelations began to spread, these doubts and accusa- tions escalated into threats of violence and active per- secution from angry mobs. The publisher of the first edition of the Book of Mormon, for example, was legit- imately concerned for his personal safety and for the security of his print shop. Smith and his brother Hyrum were eventually murdered by an angry mob while they were in jail. A large portion of the early community responded to these events by traveling to Utah for self-protection and safe haven.

The comparative point to make with respect to these two religions is this: new revelations announcing new eras are, in principle, poised against previous revelations and established social orders. The fact of ongoing revelation, then, is not just a challenge to reason. It is also a challenge to religion.

revelation and reason Defined

We have been employing two terms that deserve clear definitions. By revelation we mean a set of particular claims about transcendent realities or ulti- mate matters. These matters are not available to the five senses and it is not possible to work them out by rational means, but they are revealed to an individual or to a community, usually in a most dramatic way: through a vision; through the hearing, channeling, or inspired writing of a revelatory text; or through a visionary journey, an internal auditory event, or a miraculous event or sign of some sort. These revela- tions or “promises of salvation” are eventually written down or remembered in some relatively stable form (through a lineage of shamans, a sacred priesthood, or a scriptural canon), and then passed on from generation to generation in a variety of oral, ritual, institutional, textual, artistic, and oral forms.

By reason we mean a way of knowing that is guided by the senses; limited to information derived from them; and determined by some standardized form of logic and by the basic structures of human cognition (inductive and deductive inference, the law of the excluded middle, coherence, and so on). In a modern college or university “reason” is celebrated as a form of knowledge that is shared, debated, and honed through free and open conversation and not bound or con- trolled by any external authority, be it political or religious: essentially, Enlightenment reason.

Commentarial Traditions

For the sake of discussion, we might understand reve- lation as something given and reason as something done. We have to be careful here, though, since established religions never function simply as “givens.” To begin with, this “given” is always given within a particular cultural context and together with its codes, which are themselves products of human agency and community labor—in a specific language, in an image become symbol, in a narrative vision or dream, and so on. Moreover, after the revelation is given, it is inevi- tably taken up and actively shaped—through further

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acts of interpretation, artistic and ritual performance, and so on—into something usable and understand- able. Particularly important here is the commentarial tradition—that is, a specific body of literature and interpretive techniques that in effect “extends” and adapts the original revelation or scriptural text to new generations, through interpretation and application to the problems and questions of later historical periods.

This is especially evident in a tradition like Judaism, where the process of midrash—scriptural interpretation—is itself seen as an ongoing revelation and the ancient collections of midrash, called Talmud, are treated as authoritative. Indeed there are stories in the Jewish tradition about God attempting to intervene or to interrupt a group of rabbis debating the interpretation of a particular Torah passage. He is told to stay out. There is humor here, but there are also at least two profound points being made: inter- pretation is itself a form of revelation; and human agency is an integral part of this process.

Theology Defined

As we noted in Chapter 1, the systematization of a revelation is called “theology,” a word of Greek origin that can be analyzed into the compounds theos (“god”/“divine”) and logos (“word, reasoning, discourse, science”). Most simply put, theology is the attempt to relate reason to revelation and revelation to reason. Put a little more complexly, theology is the attempt to understand, organize, and institutionalize revelation through reason. Theology, then, is not at all the same thing as belief, although every theology begins with beliefs and every belief is a kind of implicit or beginning theology.

We might define belief as intellectual assent, either implicit or explicit, to the truth of some proposition or statement of faith. One believes that there is a God. Or one believes that one’s ancestors can interact with the living community. Or one believes that the sha- man can extract a disease, like an object, from a sick woman’s body. Or one believes that eating pork is polluting (or that it is good for you). And so on.

Theology, on the other hand, is the process of picking up the various beliefs and practices of a community, which are seldom consciously systematized, and of attempting to organize them into a coherent system, which can be rationally discussed, debated, and defended before other competing systems of belief (or unbelief ).

Historically, the practice of theology in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds has been closely connected—conceptually and institutionally—to the development and practice of philosophy. It is not for nothing that the earliest European universities devel- oped directly out of monasteries, that medieval aca- demics were almost all monks and clerics, and that to this day professors wear long flowing robes at graduation ceremonies, robes that are modeled on medieval monastic ones—another clear sign that the humanities and the liberal arts possess deep mystical roots.

Having said this, it is also true that there has been a great deal of angst expressed around the application of human reason to divine revelation. Not every era and tradition has been receptive to this project. Already the Church Father Tertullian (160–225), for example, famously asked: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the church, heretics with Christians?”5 His own answer? In so many words: “Nothing.” Echoing Tertullian, early Protestant writers spoke of the “scandalous mixing” of philosophy and the Bible; one even named the comparative method itself as the real danger. More precisely, this Protestant author wrote of the indig- nam comparationis arenam (the “unworthy arena of comparison”).6 Comparison here was precisely what got one into trouble, what was incompatible with Christianity’s exclusive truth claims.

apologetics and polemics

Theology, most broadly conceived, attempts to handle two sorts of problems that any religious system generates. The first sort is the sort encoun- tered by the revealed tradition outside the tradition itself. For example, how might the Jewish, Christian,

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and Muslim creation stories in Genesis and the Quran be reconciled (or not reconciled) with the findings of modern evolutionary biology? Or how can the teaching of the Buddha that there is no self or soul be understood in relation to the common Hindu understanding that there is an immortal self beyond the social self ? These are the sorts of question that theologians ask and try to answer.7 Recall that, as we explained in Chapter 1, theological work aimed primarily at explaining, justifying, or defend- ing, to outsiders, one’s own received revelation is called apologetics. Theological work aimed at critically engaging the revelatory claims of other communities, usually in order to relativize them, is called polemics.

The second sort of problem that theologies address is one that arises from contradictions within the revealed tradition itself. In some sense, these prob- lems are more serious than the ones of the first type, since they suggest that the system itself is incomplete, self-contradictory, or maybe just plainly mistaken.

Theology, as one very influential definition, or rather description, by Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) had it, is “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). We might expand on Anselm’s definition here in light of our above discussion and define theology, for our own compar- ative purposes, as belief in a revelation seeking some reasonable framework that can “make sense” of the original revelation for the believing community in a particular place and time. This last clause, “in a particular place and time,” is key. It explains why a community’s theology in one century is not the same as in another century.

Comparative Theology

When a believer takes religious diversity seriously, looking at it as a potential source of new religious insight and not as a simple threat to his or her own beliefs, we might begin to speak of comparative theology. Comparative theology, in the words of Francis X. Clooney, involves “acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular faith

tradition but which, from that foundation, venture into learning from one or more other faith tradi- tions.” These acts of “deep learning across religious borders” involve both intuitive and rational forms of knowledge. Comparison here

is a reflective and contemplative endeavor by which we see the other in light of our own, and our own in light of the other. It ordinarily starts with the intuition of an intriguing resemblance that prompts us to place two realities … near one another, so that they may be seen over and again, side by side.8

For Clooney, comparative theology is a type of reli- gious reading that involves detailed study of specific religious texts. When done responsibly and deeply, it “intensifies rather than dilutes religious commitment and devotion.”9

Clooney’s comparativism is an explicitly and com- mitted religious practice. It is a faithful re-reading that emerges from the conviction that the basic problem (and promise) of religious pluralism is the most basic challenge to any revealed tradition, and that religious diversity represents, to the believer, a much more serious and consequential crisis than, say, atheism might be. Why? Because the atheist positions “solves” the problem of religious pluralism by ignoring or by denying the phenomenon in question—that is, the very ancient and very modern human experience of revelation. A discipline like the comparative theology conceived by Clooney, on the other hand, acknowledges the reality of multiple rev- elations, affirms the necessity of commitment to a particular revelation or tradition, and is honest about the fact that the different revelations and traditions disagree with one another, sometimes profoundly, on important issues.

religious Tolerance and religious Freedom

There are two modern values that you have, no doubt, swimming around in your head about now.10 The first is religious tolerance. The second is religious freedom.

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We might define religious tolerance as the civic virtue or political policy that does not attempt to sup- press or eliminate religious worldviews competing with, contradicting, or even denying one’s own world- view. Robert Erlewine offers the following definition: tolerance is

a principle which claims that more good arises on a societal or even a moral level in not acting rather than acting on one’s moral disapproval regarding the actions, beliefs, and practices of the Other, so long as the Other does not directly obstruct the well-being of oneself or other Others.11

Note that such tolerance in no way implies moral acceptance or intellectual agreement and in fact is practiced mostly by not acting on one’s beliefs. Religious tolerance is more of a social truce or agreement to dif- fer: a pragmatic decision to “coexist,” as we say today.

We might define religious freedom as the related civic legal structure that protects the civil rights of a society’s citizens to practice their religions in peace, as long as these practices do not unduly impact in negative ways the religious lives and civil freedoms of other communities and individuals. Religious free- dom is, in effect, the legal expression of the moral value of religious tolerance.

Both religious tolerance and religious freedom are central to most modern liberal societies; but it should also be recognized that both come at real religious costs and produce blindspots that are seldom addressed. Moreover, the religious costs of the two civic virtues are very much related to those of comparison, which, when done sufficiently well, is not at all blind to such costs. We have been owning up to these religious costs, com- ing to terms with them, all along, and via multiple channels: through our constant emphasis on the radi- calism of the comparative method itself; through our repeated observations on the censorship, harassment, and persecution that have defined the history of comparison both in the ancient and in the modern period; and, of course, through the initiation structure of the textbook itself, which implies “Look out!”— when it does not actually shout it.

All along, we have tried to warn you. What’s the big deal? What is so costly about religious

tolerance, religious freedom, and, of all things, about a “merely academic” enterprise like the comparative study of religion? Let us consider a typical American example. Throughout recent American history, numerous court cases have involved things like the attempt to institute prayer in public schools, or to erect nativity scenes or the Ten Commandments in or around a courthouse. When such acts are later declared illegal (since they clearly violate the separation of church and state), conservative Christian voices reply that their reli- gious freedoms are being “violated.” But this is simply incorrect, since such individuals are perfectly free to practice their faith in their own communities and reli- gious institutions. There they can pray and set up all the nativity scenes and Ten Commandments they want. What they are not free to do is to impose those practices and that faith on the rest of the public; but this is exactly what they are doing with, say, the Ten Commandments in the courthouse.

In these contemporary cases people are really arguing not for religious freedom but for religious primacy: they are claiming that their religious views should be the ones defining the public space and conversation. The conservative Christian response would be very different if the local Hindu community wanted to set up a statue of the goddess Durga on the courthouse lawn, or if the local Muslim community wanted to impose Muslim prayers in the public schools. Neither of these acts would be possible in the American context.

Having said all this, there is real insight in the offended conservative Christian voices. They are accurately perceiving that there are real costs to reli- gious freedom and religious tolerance. One of these costs is that no particular religious community gets to impose its will and its ways on the others. Such a legal practice is also a comparative practice.

particularity and Universality

Very much related to this discussion are features that scholars sometimes call the particularity and universality of the world religions. What is meant

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here is that religious revelations and the respective states of salvation are almost always experienced as particular revelations that claim to be of universal significance to the community to which they are addressed and, often through that community, to the whole of humankind. The case is somewhat different in indigenous religions, which emphasize particu- larity and locality and do not usually make universal claims for the whole of humankind.

As we have it in a sacred story like that of Exodus, the God of Israel did not appear on Mount Sinai to Moses with an option to believe this or that, to do maybe this, maybe that, or with an encouragement to coexist in peace with Egyptian polytheism. This was an awesome, terrifying, literally burning event that demanded of Moses, and then of the Hebrew people, a stark set of choices and acts, literally carved into stone, as the story has it. Nor did this same God later call on his people to live as good citizens in Canaan within a civil pluralistic society, to respect, as it were, the religious freedom of others. Within the text of the Torah at least, he demanded that they conquer Canaan as their own and destroy anyone who stood in the way—and especially all those competing “idols” and Canaanite temples.

The Asian revelations are different, but not that different. The Buddha, for example, did not preach to north Indians that only they did not have a self or soul; that only they suffered by virtue of believing that they were a self or soul; and that only they could reach nirvana—the end of all suffering and self. No, as we have it in the early Buddhist texts, he preached that everyone and everything lacks a self or stable sub- stance, and that everyone suffers. Moreover, the later history of Buddhism, which spread from north India throughout South and East Asia and eventually to Europe and the Americas, only makes sense if that salvation message was understood in the way it was originally intended: as a universal fact, capable of being practiced and realized by anyone anywhere.

Religions’ revelations and states of salvation are not, then, experienced under an option to believe or not to believe them. They intervene with over- whelming power and force into the lives of individ- uals and communities and make ultimate, universal,

absolute truth claims. The problem, of course, is that there have been not just one or two, or maybe even three such revelations and salvations, but hundreds, if not actually thousands. This most fundamental challenge posed by multiple but exclusive and abso- lute revelations and states of salvation is what the civic virtues of religious tolerance and religious free- dom fail to address—what they sidestep or, most likely, politely ignore.

This same challenge is what faithful re-readings take up with courage and rigor. As already noted, a faithful re-reading is an interpretation of religion that attempts to engage religious pluralism from within a particular religious stance or faith position. It is a religious response to religious pluralism. If we desire that a litmus test distinguish a faithful re-reading from a rationalist or reflexive one, we could employ such a test in the form of a question. Let us call this question “the faith test.” It goes like this: “Does this particular type of re-reading religion privilege a particular faith tradition or an artic- ulated faith stance?” If the answer is yes, we have a faithful re-reading. If the answer is no, we do not.

Please note two things here. First, note the “or” of the litmus question. A faithful re-reading does not require that a recognizable, common, or traditional faith tradition be present. A non-traditional faith stance will suffice as well, as long as it is an articu- lated and conscious one. Second, the litmus question does not preclude other forms of inquiry, not even strong rationalist or reductive forms. Faithful re- readings, remember, are as concerned with the prin- ciples of reason as they are with the revelations of religion. What makes a faithful re-reading “faithful” is the presence of an articulated faith stance, not the absence of reason.

There are three basic types of faithful re-readings that have been endlessly discussed over the last few decades. They are as follows:

● exclusivism: the rejection of other religious worldviews on the basis of the categories of one’s own religious worldview;

● inclusivism: the acceptance of other religious worldviews on the basis of the categories of one’s own religious worldview;

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● pluralism: the potential acceptance of all religious worldviews as cultural approximations of the sacred, which is understood to overflow or transcend them all.

We suspect that, if you remember nothing else about this textbook in twenty years, it will be these three terms (okay, and the aliens). There is a good reason for this. These three categories are extremely useful in describing the positions individuals and communities take vis-à-vis other competing world- views, whether they happen to be yours or not. They work really well. To continue our toolkit metaphor, these are three major skill sets without which you will have a very difficult time “com- paring religions.”

Let us now look at some examples of each in order to get a better handle on these first three re-readings of religion.

excluding the other religious Worldview from one’s own

One of the most common responses to religious plu- ralism, especially in the western monotheistic reli- gions, is exclusivism. The logic of this re-reading is simple: there is only one God or way of being reli- gious: ours. Therefore anyone who worships a differ- ent god, no god, or even our God, but in the wrong way is to be rejected, “damned”—to use one especially common (and cruel) religious code (see Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 Compulsory colonial conversion. ©Bettmann/Corbis.

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We saw these forms of exclusivism early on in our very first chapter, with our first look at forms of comparison in the scriptures and in the histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But there are also numerous contemporary expressions of the same logic. To take two fairly typical Protestant examples, the great German theologian Karl Barth, who was probably the most influential theological voice of the twentieth century in Protestant circles, wrote:

the Christian religion is true, because it has pleased God, who alone can be the judge in this matter, to affirm it to be the true religion … it alone has the commission and the authority to be a missionary reli- gion, i.e., to confront the world of religions as the one true religion, with absolute self-confidence to invite and challenge it to abandon its ways and to start on the Christian way.

Similarly, in 1960 the Congress on World Mission explained that, “in the years since the war, more than one billion souls have passed into eternity and more than half of these went to the torment of hell fire without even hearing of Jesus Christ, who He was, or why He died on the cross of Calvary.”12

And we need not pick on what the theologian John Hick calls the “sublime bigotry” of Barth and the Protestant missionaries. Similar quotations from other world religions could be listed for a very long time. Consider the radical Islamist whom I once heard on the radio talking about non-Muslims: “They are infidels. What do I care of them? They will all burn in hell.” The logic in each of these statements is very clear: to conserve a religious worldview one must reject and condemn every other. Again, we are in a zero-sum game: “If we are right, they must be wrong.” End of story.

It would be easy to reject such a position outright. But it would be a serious mistake to see such forms of exclusivism as things of the past or as products of nothing more than simple religious intolerance. In actual fact, these worldviews are both powerful and popular and seem to be grounded in some very basic human needs.

strengths and Weaknesses of exclusivism

For example, such types of belief and identity carry very strong psychological and social benefits, to the extent that they construct a very clear ingroup, to which the believer belongs and in which she feels at home, and a very clear outgroup, against which the believer identifies herself and her community and which she considers other, foreign, dangerous, impure, and so on. From the same functional point of view, it can be seen that such forms of exclusivism also grant very dramatic forms of certainty. There is little ambiguity here, and much conviction about how the world works, what history means, who God is, and what the purpose of human life is. A profound sense of belonging, community, meaning, and cer- tainty are hardly minor accomplishments, and it is in fact quite easy to see why exclusivistic worldviews are so common and so popular.

The problem is that, whereas such a community of individuals may benefit from these forms of certainty and from those thick, high walls of exclusion— benefit, namely, via things like full parking lots, swelling rolls of membership, extensive financial support, large voting blocs, and psychological security— these very same certainties, when put next to other certainties, which are mutually contradictory, can easily result in social tension, even conflict and violence. It is really a simple matter of scale. It is one thing to be a Christian, a Muslim, a Jewish, or a Hindu exclusivist in one’s own community, among people who look like you and believe more or less the same things about the world as you do; it is quite another when the globe becomes a village and all these mutually excluding worldviews are forced to share the same social or political space and the same natural resources, not to mention the same schools, hospital wards, and places of business.

The Bridge–Bonding Dilemma

Put a bit differently, a religious strategy like exclusivism can result in real benefits at a personal or individual community level but can be highly dysfunctional and

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even dangerous at a larger social, national, or interna- tional level. Sociologists refer to this scaling problem as the bridge–bonding dilemma. The larger society requires “bridge capital,” that is, social forms that link and connect people together into a large social unit, like a city, state, or nation, whereas the ingroup requires bonding capital, that is, social forms that bond only certain people together in tight-knit communities. The dilemma arises from the simple fact that the one often comes at the expense of the other.13 These problems, of course, have been vastly exacerbated in our modern world, where the ingroups or local communities of a nation-state are (a) much more numerous because of immigration patterns and (b) much more aware of one another because of technology, transportation, and the global media.

There is also the intellectual problem of the ingroup’s “certainty.” As any good education can show, many of the things that exclusivistic forms of religion claim as certain about the world and history are in actual fact not at all certain. Indeed many of them are patently false. This is why strongly exclusiv- istic forms of religion in a culture like the USA are generally correlated with lower levels of education (although there are some very sophisticated and very educated forms of exclusivism). Generally speaking, in the United States, the more education an individual has, the less likely he or she is to hold a strongly exclusivistic religious worldview.

including the other religious Worldview within one’s own

Numerous contemporary religious communities have seen these same basic problems and have answered the challenge of religious pluralism with a different kind of faith response: with inclusivism. Inclusivistic re-readings insist on the uniqueness and absolute claims of their own revelation, while also acknowl- edging that other communities have experienced their own unique revelations, which they honor but subordinate to the absolute claims of their own.

Sometimes these re-readings represent real breaks with, or even reversals of, the tradition. One of the most instructive examples of such a change is that of Roman Catholicism and Vatican II. Vatican II was a series of official meetings of church leaders and scholars that took place in Rome from 1962 to 1965 and resulted in a set of documents that represented some new, more open, and more humble orientations to the modern world, biblical scholarship, science, and religious pluralism—among other things (see Figure 10.3).

Before Vatican II, that is, for most of Catholic his- tory, the consensus was clear that salvation resided in the Catholic Church alone. To quote the well-worn Latin sound bite (dating back to the Church Father Irenaeus in the second century ce), nulla salus extra ecclesiam: “there is no salvation outside the church.” In short, exclusivism. This position held firm until the twentieth century, when the cosmopolitan real- ities of the modern world, the findings of science, the developments of biblical scholarship, and the sophis- tication of anthropology and of the comparative study of religion began to render many of the church’s “certain” claims both emotionally unbelievable and intellectually untenable. The result was a phenomenon that amounted to a Catholic “conversion” from exclu- sivism to inclusivism, perhaps best articulated in the Vatican II document Nostra aetate (In Our Age).

This “Declaration on the Church’s Relationship to Non-Christian Religions” stated the church’s admira- tion for Hinduism, where “men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaust- ible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry,” where they “seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust.” Similarly, Buddhism is praised there as teaching “a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination.” The same document states that the church “regards with esteem” Muslims and acknowledges its profound debt and ties to “Abraham’s

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stock,” that is, to the Jewish people. “The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or reli- gion.” The key inclusivistic move, however, occurs at the heart of the document:

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere rever- ence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim

Christ “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14: 6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.14

In short, the other religions contain or reflect “a ray” of truth, but not the full truth, which can only be found in Christ and the Roman Catholic Church. To employ the language of one of the Council’s most distinguished theologians, Karl Rahner, non-Christian peoples can be thought of as “anonymous Christians” who can be saved in their own cultural and religious traditions by the grace of Christ working secretly or anonymously through these very traditions. To translate this back into our own comparative terms, the other religious

Figure 10.3 Second Vatican Council. Photographed by Hank Walker © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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worldviews are accepted, but only on the conditions and categories of one’s own religious worldview—in this case, those of the Roman Catholic Church.

Things, of course, are not always this dramatic or official. Sometimes inclusivistic re-readings are more playful. There is a funny scene in one of the episodes of a well-used comparative religion film series pro- duced by the BBC, The Long Search (1977). The edito- rial consultant of the series was the influential Scottish scholar of comparative religion Ninian Smart (1927– 2001). This particular episode happens to be on Theravada Buddhism. Narrator and guide Ronald Eyre, who became famous (at least among professors of comparative religion) for his wit and bad polyester suits, is at a Buddhist festival in Sri Lanka. If I remember it correctly (it’s been a while), he is speaking to some women there, who are standing around him and smiling. They are having a conversation, which is half-serious, half-teasing. Eyre asks the women what they think of him and his Christian faith. He is a very nice man, they say it in so many words, but he must have done something bad in his former life. Otherwise he would not have been born in a country like England (this is the point where they begin to giggle more). If, they assure him with their smiles, he can live a better life in this present life, perhaps he will have the good fortune of being born again in a better culture and religion, that is to say, in a Buddhist one.

The Buddhist women, in other words, do exactly what the Vatican document did. They accept the other person or worldview, but only on the terms and condi- tions of their own worldview, in this case, Theravada Buddhism. Whereas the Catholic document has the Buddhist secretly saved by the grace of Christ, the Buddhist women have the English Christian reincarnat- ing and progressing, gradually, toward Buddhism and its ultimate truths. Same move, different worldview.

inclusivism and Canon Formation

There are other forms or comparative practices of inclusivism. Foremost among them in the world reli- gions is canon formation, that is, the manner in which a later tradition defines the boundaries and scope of its sacred scriptures. Particularly common here is the

strategy of defining one’s own scriptural texts so as to “include” or “supersede” those of previous religions.

We have already noted this strategy in Chapter 1. In the seventh and eighth centuries, for example, the new religion of Islam relegated the much older Jewish and Christian scriptural canons to lower rungs of revealed truth: the Quran was now the full and complete word of God, which had been revealed to correct the errors of the Jewish Torah and Christian Gospels. Muhammad was declared to be the “seal of the prophets”: the final and perfect spokesman for God, after whom no further revelation was possible (the “seal” here refers to the unbroken wax seal on ancient business contracts or letters that guaranteed that no one had tampered with the contents, that the letter or contract was, if you will, “genuine”). In short, Islam thus “included” the earlier histories and incom- plete truths of Judaism and Christianity into the full and complete truth of Islam. It did not entirely reject or exclude the revelations of the Torah and of the Gospels—of what it calls the “people of the Book.” Quite the contrary. But it did not fully accept them either. It included them within its own system.

Christianity, of course, had done the same thing to Judaism five centuries earlier with its notions of an “Old” and “New” Testament, as both religions emerged and argued over who would take up the mantle of the true Israel. And the followers of Baha, or the early Baha’i movement, would adopt the same superseding strategy via-à-vis Islam in the nineteenth century. Similar inclusivistic moves, different worldviews.

Hindu Tolerance and Hierarchy

What we now call Hinduism has used similar strat- egies, if on very different religious stories and scrip- tures. Hinduism is often described as “tolerant.” This is true enough, but it is also partly false and sometimes deadly wrong, as we see, for example, in recent Hindu communalist riots and organized acts of violence and destruction aimed at Muslims in modern India. It is in fact much more accurate to say that traditional Hinduism works on the basis of an ancient hierarchical principle of inclusivism. This more ancient social and religious system is called Brahmanism. Its fundamental

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principle is hierarchy: non-brahmanical sects and groups are not excluded; they are included, but—and here is the crux—always at a lower level of this same social and religious hierarchy, where the brahmans or priests are at the all-inclusive top.

The Hindu tradition, for example, declared the Buddha to be an avatara (“incarnation”) of its own god Vishnu, stating quite explicitly that he had descended to earth in order to spread the heresy of Buddhism in order to lead astray the anti-gods. Similarly, when the Christian missionaries arrived in India in the nineteenth century preaching the incar- nation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, they were often dismayed to encounter a Hindu attitude that amounted to saying: “Well, of course, he can be one of the avatars too, just like Rama and Krishna.” Not exactly what the missionaries had in mind, but extremely effective. The other foreign incarnation was not excluded, but included within the broader and more universal embrace of “Hinduism.” In this way the Christian challenge was to a certain extent contained and neutralized.

strengths and Weaknesses of inclusivism

As with exclusivism, there are real strengths and weaknesses here. On the strength side, inclusivism allows a tradition to acknowledge what is already obvious to many of its adherents, namely the integ- rity, honesty, and humanity of religious people with different beliefs and practices. Perhaps most of all, though, inclusivism avoids, or at least seems to avoid, the obvious intolerances and potential violences of exclusivism. It thus represents a strong compromise position that manages to do two different things at once: (1) to acknowledge the other religions as legiti- mate; and (2) to insist on the fuller and more complete truths of one’s own religion. Essentially, inclusivism wants it both ways. It wants to hold on to one’s own religious certainty without erasing or eliminating the other competing truth claims.

As with exclusivism, there are not just promises here. There are also problems. Most obvious are those embarrassing scriptural passages present in any

ancient tradition that simply cannot be slotted into generous inclusivistic readings (that demanding God on Mount Sinai, or that universal teaching of the Buddha again). Exclusivistic individuals are always pointing these out. They are certainly there. There are many passages in almost any ancient scriptural canon that cannot be read—at least on their own, in isolation from the rest of the tradition and texts—in inclusivistic ways. Like the Torah passages on slaugh- tering whole villages, or the Gospel of John passage on the Jews as children of the Devil, or the Quran passages portraying the Jews as irreconcilable enemies of Muslims alongside the idolators, some scriptural passages are simply unredeemable from an inclusivist position, let alone a pluralist one.

encountering the sacred within and beyond all religious Worldviews

The faith response that has embraced the methods and findings of the comparative study of religion the most enthusiastically is pluralism. Indeed, in many ways, modern pluralism can be seen as a direct historical outgrowth and religious expression of the comparative study of religion. It is, however, also the most rare, the least traditional, and consequently the most difficult for many religious people to under- stand and appreciate, much less to accept and put into practice. It is what we had in mind when we added “faith stance” (as opposed to “faith tradition”) to our earlier faith question litmus test.

If we take a culture like the USA, for example, plu- ralism is, numerically speaking, a most uncommon position among the established religious institutions. Indeed the traditions that have clearly and unambigu- ously adopted pluralism, like the Unitarian Universalists or some branches of Reformed Judaism and Quakerism, are among the smallest religious communities in the USA. If, however, we refocus our lens and look at what we might call non-institutional religion—for example, the “I am spiritual, but not religious” crowd—then plu- ralism as a theological position can be recognized as one of the most popular and common of American

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religious responses to religious pluralism as a social fact. There is also a clear age or generational pattern at work here. At the time of writing this particular faith response is easily the most common religious position among people younger than 30 in the USA.

Assumptions aside, pluralism is not a strictly modern phenomenon. In the sixteenth century the Mughal Emperor Akbar created a small college of comparative religion at his north Indian court and, taking this comparative spirit one step further, established in 1582 a new universal religion later called “the divine faith” (Din-i-Ilahi). Emperor Akbar thus acted on his pluralism. Indeed he legislated according to it. He repealed both the hated Pilgrim’s Tax, which his predecessors had imposed on Hindus visiting their own shrines, and the traditional jizya—the religious tax for non-Muslims. Within this same plu- ralist vision, Akbar also commissioned translations of classical Hindu scriptural texts and invited Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jain, and Parsi scholars, even Catholic priests from Goa, to argue their points together in his presence. The Sikh community flourished under Akbar’s reign.

As a modern intellectual practice, pluralism can best be seen in comparative theologians who have embraced and developed these faithful re-readings over the last few decades: figures like John Hick, Raimundo Pannikar, and Paul F. Knitter. Hick’s God Has Many Names (1980) can be treated as an early and paradigmatic example of how the method approaches the problem and promise of religious pluralism.

In this text, Hick wrote of a “Copernican revolu- tion” in Christian theology. Copernicus, recall, famously argued that, contrary to what the church and common sense had it, the sun, planets, and stars do not revolve around the earth. Rather the earth and the planets revolve around the sun. The truth is the opposite of what was universally assumed. Copernicus (who was also a priest) was correct, and the Christian tradition was wrong on this point. Period.

So too with respect to God and the world religions in Hick’s modern allegory. The “sun” is God, and the “planets” are the world religions, each of which imagines (falsely) that the cosmos revolves around its

own worldview. Modern social experience and the advances of knowledge have made it intellectually impossible to believe any longer that the history of humanity’s religious experience orbits around the center of the Christian religion or any other religion. Religious people need to rethink their “Ptolemaic” ways, that is, their insistence that the universe orbits around them. All sorts of clever strategies (like inclu- sivism, Hick points out) can be used, of course, to explain away the historical and anthropological facts and to make one hold on to one’s sense of religious primacy; but, much like the early attempts to explain away Copernicus, none of these is really convincing and now they are all looking, to the outsider anyway, as “slightly ridiculous or slightly dishonest.”15

Hick at first called this new pluralistic conception of the divine “the Eternal One.” He preferred this expression, since it can be read either in personal the- istic ways or in non-personal mystical ways. Hence it can apply to western monotheisms as well as to tradi- tions like Hinduism, Greek mysticism, and Daoism (although, we must observe, it does not really work for a tradition like Buddhism). Here is Hick in 1980 on his title phrase “God has many names” (which, you might recall, had already been invoked millennia ago by India’s ancient Rig Veda):

When I say in a summarizing slogan that God has many names, I mean that the Eternal One is perceived within different human cultures under different forms, both personal and non-personal, and that from these differ- ent perceptions arise the religious ways of life which we call the great world faiths.16

No doubt thinking of Buddhism, often the glaring exception to world religion patterns, he would later move away from “the Eternal One” and switch to a more inclusive referent: “the Real.”

pluralism is a Truth Claim

Sometimes pluralism is read as a kind of happy, fuzzy “anything goes” response, in effect a kind of intellec- tual laziness or irresponsible denial of real difference

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and real-world complexity. One can certainly find examples of such moments, but this is hardly a necessary feature of the pluralist logic, which is also radically exclusivistic. Pluralism insists on affirming and negating religious forms at the same time. The Jesuit missionary in India with whom we began this chapter was correct: to affirm all religions, as the Mughal Emperor Akbar was doing, is also to deny the claims of each and every one of them.

We are all exclusivists, in the simplest sense that any clear position we take must, by necessity, exclude and deny those positions that are logically contrary to it. Perhaps that is why we are so seldom clear.

The pluralist, then, like the exclusivist and the inclusivist, is making an absolute claim, which denies and excludes other faith claims. But this absolute claim is not rooted in, limited to, or exhausted by any single historical religious tradition. That is the truth claim.

strengths and Weaknesses of pluralism

Again, there are both real advantages here and real problems, just as we saw in the case of exclusivism and inclusivism. The advantages come down to the simple observation that pluralism is easily the faith response that is the most adequate to the history of religions as we know it today. Put simply, it is very difficult for many people to learn something of the full scope of human religious belief and practice and then to imagine that God just happened to speak the full or only truth to one’s own very particular culture or ethnicity. That strikes many as suspicious and, well, more than a bit self-serving. It certainly suggests a rather flippant, ethnocentric, even cruel God, who plays favorites and who leaves most of humanity in darkness or only partial light. Pluralism will have none of this.

The problems or dilemmas arise from this same universalism. It is clear, for example, that all sorts of human knowledge are by no means evenly distributed between cultures and times. It is difficult to see why this unevenness would not extend to religious, moral, and philosophical subjects as well. A related issue here

is that we also know that moral positions that become widely admired often begin in marginal or persecuted individuals and communities that claim religious inspiration for their very particular positions. We see exactly this in historical instances—from the radical gender equity of spiritualists in nineteenth-century America, through the non-violent campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi in British India in the twentieth, to the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. These were all religiously inspired movements, and they argued for or accomplished dramatic moral ends, none of which would have been possible without these same very particular and very specific religious inspirations and motivations.

The pluralist’s egalitarianism also produces a most acute pragmatic problem: if God speaks more or less equally to all human communities, then why belong to this particular community instead of that one? Indeed, why belong to any religious community at all? The walls of the ingroup are so thin and so low here that it is not even clear that there are walls to be had. Consequently, the parking lots of pluralist reli- gious communities tend to be very small and their membership lists very short. The more pluralist a religious tradition becomes, the smaller it becomes. To return to the bridge–bonding dilemma model, we might say that the pluralist community has put all of its eggs in the “bridge” basket, and so its ability to “bond” is seriously compromised. The exclusivist or fundamentalist community does the opposite: it puts all its eggs in the “bond” basket, and so its ability to “bridge” is seriously compromised.

Other dilemmas are logical and moral ones. Can the pluralist, for example, really accept the exclusivist and his or her own religious claims as a legitimate expression of the sacred? Can a pluralist tolerate intol- erance? Can the pluralist take a firm moral position on religious practices that violate his or her own religious humanism, say, on female circumcision or female genital mutilation (FGM), so prominent in northeastern Africa, on the Hindu caste system, on Christian fundamentalist hate-mongering around the issue of homosexuality, or on the Muslim Pakistani practice of imprisoning or killing daughters who are

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raped? Clearly, some kind of distinction must be made between the revelatory core of a tradition and its cultural and social expressions. But can such a distinction really be made? These are some of the problems that any pluralist must face.

Comparison is Justice: liberation, Black, Feminist, and Queer Theologies

Exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, then. Here are three ways to put your world back together again after it has been taken apart in the bright light that is reli- gious pluralism. Here are three ways to be religious among the countless religions.

But the social fact of religious pluralism is not the only problem that confronts the believer in the modern world. There are other major concerns that call for new ways of thinking. There are thus other specifically religious ways of re-reading religion. Foremost among these is a whole set of faithful re- readings that do not compare religions primarily on the basis of their approach to other religions, but on the basis of how they lead (or do not lead) to social practices, personal attitudes, and stable political, economic, and legal institutions that are just and fair. The fundamental concern with these faithful re- readings is not the type of God or ultimate reality one assumes, but how this model of divinity or reality leads to real and lasting social justice and human flourishing.

For own comparative purposes here, we might define social justice as the moral insistence on being treated the same. We might even say that justice is itself a kind of universal comparative practice, that sameness is justice, as long as we understand that this sameness does not mean that everyone must be the same (the same religion, the same race, the same gender, the same sexual orientation, and so on), but that everyone should be treated the same by a soci- ety’s public, educational, legal, and political institu- tions, regardless of one’s religious, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences. In short, sameness is justice only

to the extent that it can also acknowledge and accept real and lasting difference.

Put differently, comparison is justice. Different forms of modern theology have arisen in

the last century or so that operate on this same fundamental comparativist logic according to which justice is the balancing of sameness and difference. As we shall see, all of these ways of doing theology are linked, both conceptually and historically, since it is extremely difficult to argue effectively for the equality of one group or class of people while demeaning or rejecting another (although, ironically, this is often pre- cisely the case in particular communities to this day). So, for example, many minorities will argue strenu- ously for religious equality in contemporary democratic societies, even as they deny full equality to women in their own communities and belief systems; or many churches in the USA or Africa will witness powerfully to, say, racial equality, even as they seek to deny basic civil rights to gay and lesbian peoples; and so on.

It is precisely these sorts of inconsistent discrimina- tions that this particular group of faithful re-readings of religion have sought to address. Together, they have produced massive literatures and an immense sweep of powerful social movements that have, together, helped reshape modern society in fundamental ways. We will concern ourselves here with just four major chords in this long moral symphony: liberation the- ology, black theology, feminist theology, and queer theology.17 Each of these theological traditions rose to prominence in the Americas within the last sixty years (more or less in the order in which we have just listed them), but each one also possesses deep roots that stretch back into global history. As we shall see, three nineteenth-century movements in the USA were particularly influential: the social gospel movement, the abolition movement, and the early women’s movement.

liberation Theology

Most simply put, liberation theology is a way of thinking and speaking of God that understands God as identifying with the poor, the marginalized, and

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the oppressed. It arose in the 1950s and 1960s among Latin American intellectuals who were increasingly concerned about how the Roman Catholic Church was aligning itself with the rich and powerful and how this religious–political alignment was helping to produce all sorts of authoritarian and oppressive political regimes. Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Roman Catholic priest from Peru, is usually identified as one of the movement’s key figures. It was he who coined the expression “liberation theology” in 1971, in his book A Theology of Liberation (originally published in Spanish). Other key figures include the Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino from El Salvador and the Brazilian and former Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff, both of whom have come into conflict with the Vatican for their writings.

If one reads the Bible from the perspective of the oppressed and the poor, these intellectuals argued, it is obvious that the biblical God sides in this life and world with the poor, not with the rich; with the oppressed, not with those in power. The Jewish salva- tion narrative orbits precisely around an enslaved people (the Hebrews of Exodus) being liberated from an oppressive political regime in Egypt (hence the importance of this biblical story for the black slaves in the American South of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). The same applies to the bib- lical prophets: they witnessed to a God who was angered by the injustices and gross inequalities of Israelite society and by the corruptions of political power, which were so often evident in Israel’s institu- tion of monarchy. The God of the prophets is a God who demands justice and fairness. Here salvation is not some post-mortem place of rest and reward. Indeed, shockingly, the Hebrew Bible knows virtually nothing of an afterlife until very late, in just a few pages—those of Daniel, for example. In the older prophetic books, salvation is all about political liberation and social justice. It is about the here and now. It is about justice.

So too with the New Testament, the gospels, and the moral message of Jesus. That Galilean firebrand, the Latin American theologians pointed out, did not preach: “Blessed are the rich, for they have worked

hard for their wealth and deserve it.” He preached: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Luke 6.20). And, lest you jump to conclu- sions here, the “kingdom of heaven” did not mean the heaven of modern piety. It was an alternative expres- sion for the “kingdom of God” in the gospels (since pious Jews would avoid using the word “God” in their speech and writing). Numerous gospel passages describe such a kingdom as a mystery or state of salvation available in the here and now.

Moreover, this same historical Jesus did not die quietly in his sleep or of old age, feted by politicians and churchmen and made wealthy by an adoring flock. He died a gruesome, horrible death as a tortured political prisoner, as a hated and rejected criminal. In effect, he was brutally killed by a deadly cocktail of religion and politics. And why not? He had given powerful witness to the gross injustices that these two institutions had imposed on the poor through their purity codes, their sacred hierarchies, and their colonizing ambitions and imperialistic violences.

As the Latin American intellectuals developed these kinds of faithful re-readings, their theology began to form around a few core interpretive princi- ples. One of these was what Gutiérrez popularized through the phrase “the preferential option for the poor.” He meant by this expression that the Bible should be read, and so Christian life should be lived, in ways that, like God, identified with the poor and the downtrodden. But the liberation theologians went further. Because they were schooled in socio- logical theory, and particularly in Marxist theory, they realized that the injustices of society are struc- tural and not simply personal: they realized that peo- ple suffer and are oppressed not primarily because of their individual choices or intentions (this is what those who want to conserve the inequalities of a society always argue—they effectively blame the vic- tims), but because the social, political, and religious institutions they live in are set up in a way that makes it impossible for people to be treated equally and justly. It is not that the poor and the marginalized are playing the game badly; it is that the rules of the game

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are set up in a way that makes it impossible for them to win—or even to get in the game, for that matter.

The corollary of this basic sociological insight fol- lowed closely: if things were going to change, they would have to change at a social and institutional level, and not just at a personal level. No “change of heart” by this or that individual would do. Salvation could no longer be simply a personal matter, about “saving one’s soul.” It would now have to be also a social matter, about transforming society into the kingdom of God. The game itself has to change.

These were not entirely new ideas. Earlier versions of these same faithful re-readings had been advanced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the USA, within something called the social gospel movement, perhaps best embodied by a Baptist min- ister named Walter Rauschenbusch in his classic works Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). What Rauschenbusch was so concerned about in his own day was the gross wealth of the business magnates—or “robber barons,” as they were called (since they “robbed” the wealth of society and hoarded it for themselves)—and the way these wealthy businessmen were using poor people to work in their factories and on their railroads. Child labor was a particularly obvious and noxious social problem here, as were the grueling hours of the working poor, who were basically little more than legal slaves.

Black Theology

The basic insights of the social gospel movement and later Latin American liberation theologies were persua- sive. Accordingly, they helped inspire other types of theology, whose primary concerns were liberation from economic oppression and social injustice. Arguably the earliest of these developments in North America was black theology: a way of doing theology that thinks and speaks of God from the perspective of the historical experience of African Americans, who, like the Hebrews, were once chattel slaves and continue to suffer all sorts of prejudices and injustices because of their skin color and assumed racial characteristics.18

Black theology was by no means simply a response to Latin American liberation theology, however. It emerged organically from the North Atlantic slave trade (the first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619) and from the long African American experi- ence of forced servitude and violent oppression over two and a half centuries. Particularly important here were the horrific public lynchings that lasted well into the twentieth century (dummies of President Barack Obama were lynched in a number of states as late as 2012, during the presidential election); the white Christian terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan; and the dramatic social transformations of the 1960s.

The northern black intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, who was a student of William James at Harvard, set the agenda early on for this form of thought in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), namely around the various subtle and explicit ways in which American racism created a “double consciousness” in black people, denying them the public power to signify and thereby define their own souls; but he also established—and this is crucial—a perspective outside the social system that grants them particu- larly acute insights into how it works (and does not work for black people). He called the former—the denial to signify oneself—a “veil,” and the latter—the ability to see through the social fiction—the gift of “second-sight”:

The Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double con- sciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striv- ings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.19

There are other ways to be “split in two”—social and political ways. Trauma can be social.

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Of particular interest here was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This was a wide- spread social movement in the USA that sought to overturn an array of “Jim Crow” and “Jane Crow” laws (which segregated and restricted black people from particular public places, like restaurants and transportation services), institutions, attitudes, and policies deeply embedded in American society. Two figures were of iconic importance here: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little). King, a Baptist minister with a PhD, was a powerful preacher and eloquent voice who took up non-violent means of protest as his primary method of social change. He believed in the full integration of blacks and whites within American society. King was partly inspired here by the Hindu political and reli- gious leader Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist for his inclusive policies toward Muslims. Probably King’s most famous speech is “I Have a Dream,” which he gave in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall in the summer of 1963, a little over one hundred years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863. King was assassi- nated in 1968 by the segregationist James Earl Ray (see Figure 10.4).

Malcolm X took a different approach. Originally he preached black supremacy, sought a policy of sep- aration of blacks and whites, and joined the Nation of Islam. Later he took a pilgrimage to Mecca, converted to Sunni Islam, and renounced racism of any sort after he saw races of all kinds interacting as equals on the Hajj (the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca). One consistent theme throughout his life, however, was his standing argument that African Americans cannot be liberated with their oppressors’ religion, that is, through Christianity. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, at a public meeting, with twenty-one shots to his body, at close range. Three Nation of Islam members were convicted.

In its origins in the late 1960s, black theology was a synthesis of the legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. King’s Christian gospel of love and non- violence is carried by the “theology” part; Malcolm X’s

message of black power and self-determination is car- ried by the “black” part.20 James Cone was the principal architect of black theology. Cone’s two first books, Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), set the tone and context of much that would follow, including his central and controversial notion of God’s ontological blackness.

The term “ontological” refers to the being, nature, or core reality of something. Cone was arguing that God’s being is indistinguishable from the being of black people, and that this gives rise to God’s action on behalf of black peoples.21 Cone was not, of course, referring to God’s skin color, but to God’s identification with the oppressed, which in the USA means an identification with the plight and suffer- ings of African Americans or black people. In this

Figure 10.4 National Memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington, DC. © Stephen St. John/Getty Images.

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view, anyone who works for justice and freedom is ontologically “black.”

Black theology does not generally read the Bible literally, and for good reason. The Bible has been used to justify both American slavery and South African apartheid.22 And this is because the Bible itself tolerates and even implicitly promotes the prac- tice of slavery. Consider this passage, with the usual biblical notion that women in particular are male property (sex, marriage, and slavery are deeply inter- twined in the religious imagination):

When you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person, without debt. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. (Exodus 21.2–4)

Or this one from the same book and chapter:

When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property. (Exodus 21.20–21)

Numerous New Testament passages could also be cited here and discussed at great length (and to dev- astating effect to any literal reading of the Bible).23 Here, after all, we find lines on how slaves should obey their masters “with respect and fear,” as they would obey Christ (Ephesians 6.5); the apostle Paul returns a runaway slave to his master (Philemon); and a passage in 1 Peter actually encourages slaves to endure unjust beatings as part of their salvation (1 Peter 2.18–21). Also relevant here are the commonly cited passages on why wives should be subject to their husbands and why children should obey their parents (Colossians 3.18–4.1; Ephesians 5.21–6.9). Always left out of this discussion today is the fact that these same passages explicitly link a patriarch’s authority in his household, over his wife and children,

to his authority over his household slaves. The patriarchal family and the institution of slavery are clearly understood to participate in the same divine order, the free man at the top of the hier- archy standing in for Christ as the ultimate “master” or “head.”

Little wonder that many sincere Protestant Christians in the USA assumed that the Bible was on their side in the nineteenth-century debates around the abolition of slavery. Read literally, it was. Even the pope agreed with them. In 1866 Pope Pious IX signed a declaration that “[i]t is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given.” Similar notions can again be found in the Quran and in the history of Islam, particularly around the legal status of female slaves. From the perspective of early experts on Islamic law, the slave concubine is con- sidered to be the milk or “property” of her owner, who has a legal right to have sex with her as his sexual property, as did slave owners in general in the ancient Near East.24

The bottom line is this: the social worlds from which the three monotheistic scriptural canons emerged assumed the institution of slavery. They did not seriously question it. Hence the prominence of the practice of slavery in the histories of Christianity and Islam. Interestingly, Judaism is a relative exception here again. Whereas Christians and Muslims enslaved peoples in immense numbers for centuries, Jews engaged in the practice only sporadically, although examples can be found.

Such biblical texts and ugly religious histories have led black historians of religions and theologians like Charles Long and Anthony Pinn to question whether discussion and analysis of the black religious experience should be restricted to Christian sources (an echo of Malcolm X). They have also pointed out that the black religious experience in America is hardly restricted to the Christian churches. African Americans, after all, inhabit countless religious worlds, from Africa-inspired conjuring and magical traditions like Voodoo and Santería, through various Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish traditions, to humanism, Buddhism, and various

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esoteric traditions (think Masonic Lodges and UFO encounters, as we find, for example, in the Nation of Islam and in the leader Louis Farrakhan’s Mother Wheel).25 Scholars have also turned to African American slave narratives, to literary, material, and popular culture (black literature, quilting cultures, and rap music, for example), and to traditional black folklore for their source materials and to African religions and humanism for some of their new theoretical perspectives.

It is really quite impossible to overemphasize the importance of the African American experience for the modern study of religion, particularly in the lat- ter’s North American forms. We have dedicated an entire chapter in this textbook to gender, but we could have just as easily dedicated an entire chapter to race. Clearly race is just as foundational for the moral underpinnings and social expressions of the study of religion.

Feminist Theology

The subjects of race and gender are deeply intertwined, both historically and conceptually. For example, in the nineteenth-century abolition movement, it was the issue of black slavery that first inspired American Christian women activists to work for the abolition of slavery, which in turn made them realize something of the depths of their own subservient condition. These women attempted to take leading roles in the movement—at meetings, in churches, in the press, at the pulpit. Again and again, they were denied those leadership roles, those voices, and that pulpit. They were forced to the conclusion that it was more than a little ironic to work for the freedoms of black slaves when most of these same freedoms were explicitly denied to their gender, both in churches and in town squares.

They responded with what was, in essence, the first American “wave” of the women’s movement, which focused on the issue of suffrage (the right to vote) and produced wonderfully colorful figures like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and classic texts like Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible (1895–1898)—an extraordinary commentary on many of the biblical

books from the perspective of a female reader. All this was in effect one of the modern beginnings of what would become feminist philosophy and feminist theology in the 1960s through the 1980s—a period often referred to as the second wave of the women’s movement.26

Feminist theology is a way of doing theology that thinks and speaks of God from the perspective of those who have traditionally been excluded from thinking and speaking of God in every world reli- gion: women. Feminist theologians recognize that most traditional language about “God” is male lan- guage that privileges male psychology and authority, along with notions of transcendence and omnipo- tence and the imperial and colonial violences that lie behind those notions. Feminist theology generally rejects such models of divinity as dangerous and one-sided, preferring instead to emphasize the female qualities of relationship, connectedness, and nur- turing. More specifically, feminist re-readings of reli- gion work through a balancing of the principles of sameness and difference: sameness is viewed, again as justice, in the sense that women should be treated as equals at every level (legal, cultural, and personal), and difference is defined mostly through the princi- ples of mutuality, connectedness, and relationship— with family, with social others, with the environment, and so on.

As feminist theology developed, it became more and more apparent that the women from whose per- spective the theology was to be done were themselves very different. It became apparent that there is no such thing as just a “woman.” There are white women, black women, Latina women, Asian women, straight women, lesbian women, married women, single women, middle-class women, poor women, mothers, wives, lovers, daughters, grandmothers, and so on. And each community, each perspective produces dif- ferent social concerns, and hence different models of divinity and religious practice (see Figure 10.5).

Feminist theology thus began to branch out further, particularly after 1982, when the African American author Alice Walker published her pioneering book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. With this book

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and this author, whose novel The Color Purple also functions as a key text within this tradition of re-reading, a new expression was born: womanist theology, which we might define as feminist theology done from the perspective of black women. These women pointed out that black theology was also a male theology, and that it more or less ignored the experiences and per- spectives of a full half of black people—women. Such a logic was persuasive, and it was quickly extended into Latina feminist theology (which is sometimes called mujerista theology) and into Asian feminist theology (Asian women constitute a full quarter of the world’s population).

The central lesson here is this: thinking about God and religion is never neutral, never objective—nor should it be. Theology, as James Cone pointed out, is always interested, always local, always done from a particular perspective for a particular community. The corollary of this obvious truth quickly follows, and it is a radically pluralistic one: no single model of God and religion should be imposed on anyone, since no single model of God and religion can possibly represent and

express the historical experiences of every community or body. Once again, religion is radically, fundamen- tally, irreducibly plural.

Queer Theology

The next major development in these comparative theologies of justice was LGBT theology. LGBT (les- bian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual) theology takes up the basic principles of earlier liberation theologies and employs them to reinterpret the biblical texts and to think and speak about God from the perspective of people with socially marginalized sexualities, be these lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual.

In feminist theology one often has to speculate about the perspectives of the women involved in a particular scriptural text or teaching, since these texts and teachings—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, you name it—were almost always written by and for men. In male gay theology, however, the situation is often quite different, in the sense that the homoeroticism of a text or tradition is

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often explicit; it is an open secret, if you will. After all, many of their authors were men, and as men they had access to voices and modes of expression that their female counterparts did not. The result is that the male homoeroticism of a scriptural or ritual tradition is often quite easy to see. Scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and Roman Catholicism are particularly rich and provocative here, mostly because these were the traditions of the scholars who devel- oped these same gay or queer faithful re-readings.

One of the foundational texts of LGBT theology is Yale historian John Boswell’s magisterial work Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980), which demonstrated that, along its history, Christianity was not particularly concerned about “homosexuality” until the medieval period, some- where around the twelfth century. Indeed many texts from the Bible and from Christian history—espe- cially texts produced in the clerical and institutional ranks of the Roman Catholic Church—can easily be re-read as celebrating homoerotic love, Boswell pointed out. Hence his famous subtitle: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.

This subtitle became famous because it sat as a direct challenge to one of Boswell’s own inspirations: the work of Michel Foucault and his three-volume History of Sexuality. Foucault had previously argued that categories like “homosexuality” and “gay”—and indeed the whole notion of a “sexual orientation”— were modern constructions of the nineteenth century (this, as we have seen, is a questionable assumption). For Foucault, human sexuality is always more fluid than such simplistic categories would suggest, and sexual practices and identities are products of con- stantly shifting and changing cultural norms and social “discipline.” The latter is a very broad term that points to the ways our innermost desires and norms are shaped and controlled by all the surrounding social factors, from religious principles and moral norms through the official categories of professional psychiatry to civil and criminal law codes.

Beginning with her classic work Gender Trouble (1990), the feminist philosopher Judith Butler has

advanced this model yet further, through her fundamental notion of gender as a socially enacted performance and of desire as a function of social norms. To put it very simply (perhaps too simply), in this model one does not “have” a sexual orientation— one does not just “desire” anything; one performs a gender and a sexuality via stylized acts and scripts provided by the surrounding culture.

This last approach to human sexuality, which empha- sizes fluidity and the social construction of all sexual desire and identity, is technically referred to as queer theory. Although the two share many intellectual influ- ences and values, queer theory is in fact quite different from LGBT theology, since it is much more reticent about locating clear sexual identities in pre-modern his- tory or in non-western cultures. This difference has major implications for the kinds of justice that each approach advances. Whereas LGBT theology claims justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered peo- ple throughout history and across cultures (since such people really existed), queer theology wants to critique the very notion of a sexual identity as a limiting and often dehumanizing, even sinful social construction— an invention used to discriminate against particular people and their always fluid desires.

Later on contemporary scholars like Robert Goss and Mark Jordan took up this line of thought, which is specific of queer theology. Goss, a public activist and a scholar, has written two provocative books that present Jesus as a radical social reformer who “acted up,” that is, who sided with the poor and marginal- ized (and hence would definitely side with the sexu- ally marginalized today) and was likely anything but “straight.”27 For his part, Jordan, a trained medievalist and theologian, has employed queer theory in ele- gant theological studies of the invention of “sodomy” in medieval theology (the term originally covered everything from anal sex to masturbation) and in the institutional paradoxes of contemporary Roman Catholicism, which is at once internally homoerotic and externally homophobic.28

Much of this work flows from the insight that sexual desire is never free from internal and external restraints—or, as Foucault put it, from “policing” and

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“disciplining”—and that, moreover, sexual desire itself often requires these social repressions to work. Human beings often desire most precisely that which is forbidden: prohibition increases desire. Hence human sexuality is seldom simple or without conflict. Accordingly, a religious tradition can be deeply homophobic in its social teachings (the prohibition part) and deeply homoerotic in its inner institutional structures and spiritual life (the desire part). The two poles are by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed, they often work together as the very psychosexual “engine” of holiness itself (see Figure 10.6).

As Jordan demonstrates in The Silence of Sodom, for example, a tradition like Roman Catholicism may condemn the expression of homosexuality, but one

result of this moral discipline (or prohibition) is that Catholic gay men, being deprived of a licit or accept- able outlet in society, find celibacy and priesthood (read: freedom from straight life) particularly attrac- tive. Accordingly they come to dominate the demo- graphics, and hence the institutional cultures, of those celibate (read: non-heterosexual) professions. In effect sexual repression leads to different kinds of erotic sublimations, and in this case it leads to spiritual lives that may not be overtly sexual at all but are expressed through all sorts of coded queer acts— from loving a perfect god-man to eating his body (never the body of a woman, please note) and to living in same-sex communities. This same queer re- reading also explains the Catholic prohibition against married men and women becoming priests: straight men or women would obviously weaken, if not even- tually dissolve, the strong male homoerotic dynamic of clerical culture.

It bears repeating that similar observations could easily be made, and have been made, in other reli- gious contexts, from Buddhist monasticism and Hindu sainthood to Native American shamanism and Islamic Sufism. What we have here is another clear gender and sexual pattern in the general history of religions.

We can also see reactions to these common gender and sexual patterns: we can see rabidly homophobic strains in numerous religions on any continent. The roles of some of the African states and Christian churches have been especially evident recently. Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, blamed gays and lesbians for the problems of his country. In Cameroon gays and lesbians have been imprisoned for their sexual orientations. The former Anglican archbishop of Nigeria, the Most Reverend Peter Akinola, led his church in an attempt to break away from the Anglican community because an American church ordained an open homosexual, the Reverend Gene Robinson. There was even a draft bill in the Ugandan parliament that would have defined same-sex relations as a capital offense. It failed, but not before one of its opponents was murdered.29

The struggle goes on around the world.

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Thinking Justice

All of these theologies of justice are related, and this for at least two reasons. First, they are related because these modes of re-reading religion are not disinterested, or simply descriptive. They are openly concerned re-read- ings, designed to change people’s hearts and society’s institutions. They are religious re-readings of religion.

Second, they are related because the logic of reli- gious discrimination has worked in remarkably sim- ilar ways in different historical contexts. Hence they must be confronted and addressed in similar ways. We might summarize this process of religious discrimination, re-reading, and social liberation in four basic movements:

1 A cultural majority decides that a particular class of people, defined by some physical or cultural characteristic, is less than human (“damned,” “infi- dels,” “impure,” “primitives,” “low caste”) and hence not deserving of the same rights, dignity, and opportunities that the cultural majority enjoys.

2 The same cultural majority uses its revealed texts and teachings to justify this oppression; and all traditional scriptures, produced as they were in ancient cultures that assumed things like slavery, the subordination of women, and the necessity of war, are rich in such prejudices.

3 The literal authority of these same scriptures or traditions breaks down in the light of modernity, historical criticism, and commentary, particularly as these re-readings are performed by members of the oppressed class.

4 Finally, the oppression and social injustice is removed or at least ameliorated, inevitably against the received readings of the religions and through a new modern (and often partly secular) logic of human freedom, dignity, and equality.

What is so interesting about this process from a his- torical perspective is how consistent it is and how short the historical memories of the discriminating religious communities are. Quoting the discrimina- tory passages from the Bible, for example, was the

defense of those who argued for the biblical roots of slavery; as it was for those who argued for the “proper place” of women in the home and away from the voting booth and the pulpit; as it was for people who argued for the persecution of Jews in Europe; as it was for those who insisted on the segregation of blacks and whites in the American South or, more recently, in South Africa; as it is now for those who argue against the integrity of gay, lesbian, and trans- gendered peoples. The actors and the proof texts change, but the project is basically the same: go back to a set of ancient social values “frozen” in a scriptural text and attempt to impose them on people today.

No major world religion is immune from this dis- criminatory logic and this difficult history. They have only used different scriptural texts to discriminate against different types of people. Specific religious communities, however, have engaged in discrimina- tory practices to different extents. As we have already noted, whereas the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran all contain passages clearly supportive of slavery, only Christianity and Islam engaged in the massive enslavement of peoples over the centuries. Judaism did not. If we turned our focus on caste and social oppres- sion in Asia, similar comparisons could be drawn bet- ween Hinduism (which assumes the institution of caste) and Buddhism (which generally rejects it). Hence the career of one of India’s greatest modern social reformers, B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), whose movement involved the conversion of Indian Dalits to a socially progressive form of Theravada Buddhism.

Again, no religion or culture is immune from these sorts of comparisons from the perspective of justice defined as “being treated the same.” Accordingly, when the editors of the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion, one of the standard and most distinguished reference books in the field, sought to update the first edition after the turn of the millennium, they asked their chosen contributors to emphasize three crucial categories: sex, class, and race. Through this move the editors made explicit and highlighted what had long been implicit in the scholarly tradition: the link between academic method and social justice, and the imperative that,

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when it comes to the study of religion, nothing should be removed from the public table of critical analysis. Nothing can be sacred here.

nuances: Faith and scholarship

Finally, it seems appropriate to add a note on the need for nuance in understanding and practicing faithful re-readings. One’s stance on faith does not simply impose a position on religious pluralism or social justice. It also informs how one studies reli- gion: the kinds of questions one asks, what one sees in another faith, what one misses, the kinds of moral positions that this study produces, and so on.

George Marsden, a historian of Evangelical Christianity, has noted that, whereas all sorts of other identities are valued and freely displayed in the academy (ethnic identities, racial identities, sexual identities, and so on), religious identities are gener- ally discouraged, or even demeaned as illegitimate intellectual perspectives.30 This is clearly a double standard. It is also clearly wrong, as religious subjec- tivities, just like other types of subjectivity, grant

particular insights and nuances to scholarship, espe- cially on humanist subjects like literature, philos- ophy, art, and, of course, religion. If handled in a nuanced, sophisticated, and self-critical way, a faith position need not produce scholarship of any lower quality. Indeed it might actually produce better schol- arship. It certainly produces scholarship with different accents and nuances.

To take just one example, it has been observed that the history of comparative theology displays the prominence of Catholic theologians and intellec- tuals. In this reading, Catholicism encourages and nurtures a particular kind of comparative practice. Similar observations could also be made, of course, about black theology, feminist theology, and queer theology, which display, respectively, a prominence of black, female, and queer intellectuals.

So we do not want to leave you with the impression that religious perspectives simply lead to discrimination. This is not true. Religious belief can sharpen as well as distort. Religious conviction can produce better and worse re-readings of religion, depending upon how it is handled and, most of all, depending upon how reflexive it is.

The Tough Questions

1 How is the statement “A Buddhist is going to hell” or “Non-Muslims are infidels” any differ- ent from “Blacks are inferior”? Are not all three forms of bigotry and ignorance, the former couched in religious language, the lat- ter in racist language? Why do we generally tolerate the former, but not the latter?

2 What is your community’s position on mixed marriages, that is, marriages between two people of two different faith traditions? Where does religious community end and religious discrimination begin?

3 Watch Mende Nazar describe her experience of slavery and the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic

scriptural passages that are used to justify it, at http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/confer- ences/beyond-slavery/videos/mende-nazer. How can a scriptural text that is “revealed” jus- tify a social practice that almost everyone today would consider morally abominable? And, if these scriptural passages on slavery can no longer be supported, why take other scriptural passages on other ancient social practices and convictions (like the “impure” status of homo- sexual acts) as relevant or authoritative?

4 Can a person who adopts a pluralistic position really be tolerant of all other worldviews? Can one tolerate intolerance?

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notes

1 Tessa Dick, Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright (CreateSpace, 2009), 75–79. The details of this story shift from one account to another, of which there are many (a not uncommon phenomenon with reli- gious narratives). I am telling here the standard ver- sion, as it were. Tessa Dick has the young woman delivering the author’s regular high blood pressure medicine on the third day after the oral surgery and states that the pink light was sunlight bouncing off a bumper sticker with a silver fish sign on their west window, not off the young woman’s Christian neck- lace. Whatever happened, it changed the author in dramatic ways.

2 Lawrence Sutin, ed., In Pursuit of Valis (Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991), 102, xvii, 81.

3 Brent Landau, Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 91.

4 For an excellent summary of Baha’i theology, see William Garlington, The Baha’i Faith in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).

5 Tertullian, On the Prescription against Heretics, Ch. 7. 6 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy:

Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 121, 108, 91.

7 This question is best framed as a question of Hindu theology or Buddhist philosophy, since, technically speaking, there is no such thing as Buddhist theology, there being no “God” there.

8 Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), 10–11.

9 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 21. 10 See Robert Erlewine, “Monotheism, Tolerance, and

Pluralism: The Current Impasse.” Chapter 1 in his Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

11 Erlewine, “Monotheism, Tolerance, and Pluralism,” 7. 12 Both quotations are taken from John Hick, God Has

Many Names (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press,1982), 30, 90.

13 Michael O. Emerson, People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 93.

14 This document can easily be found on the Vatican’s website at http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/x-Schede/ CSNs/CSNs_G_Giud.html (last accessed on August 23, 2013).

15 Hick, God Has Many Names, 68. 16 Hick, God Has Many Names, 59. 17 There are other important traditions not treated here,

including Native American theologies of justice and emerging eco-theologies.

18 For a summary of black theology upon which I am relying here, see Anthony B. Pinn, “Black Theology.” In Liberation Theologies in the United States: An Introduction, edited by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and Anthony B. Pinn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 15–36.

19 W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 2.

20 James S. Olson, Equality Deferred: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration in America Since 1945 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003), 64–66; quoted in Pinn, “Black Theology,” 20.

21 My thanks to my Rice colleague, Anthony Pinn, for help on this point, and so much more.

22 For the African case, see Elias Bongmba, “African Theology.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, edited by Elias Kifon Bongmba (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 241–254.

23 For two stunning studies, see Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006); and J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2005).

24 We are relying in this paragraph on Bernadette J. Brooten’s unpublished paper “Overcoming the Legacy of Slavery: A Challenge for Religion,” delivered at Rice University, February 19, 2013, which is in turn based on Bernadette J. Brooten, ed., with Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Beyond Slavery: Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For the issue of slave concubinage, see Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

25 For a map of this diversity, see Anthony B. Pinn, The African American Religious Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).

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26 There were, of course, other influences, particularly European literary and philosophical ones, from key texts like Virginia Woolf ’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) and Simone Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949).

27 Robert E. Goss, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) and Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2002).

28 See, for example, Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

1998) and The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

29 Elias Kifon Bongmba, “Introduction.” In The Wiley- Blackwell Companion to African Religions, edited by Elias Kifon Bongmba (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 2012, 19.

30 George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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Annunciation of the Second Coming (1996), by Lynn Randolph, 58″ × 46″.

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