After Pluralism

Reimagining Religious Engagement

Courtney Bender, Pamela Klassen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231527262
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

The contributors to this volume treat pluralism as a concept that is historically and ideologically produced or, put another way, as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique considers how religious difference is framed as a problem that only pluralism can solve. Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, the essays in After Pluralism explore pluralism as a "term of art" that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sites—Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories—and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. Throughout, they question assumptions underlying pluralism's discourse and its influence on the legal decisions that shape modern religious practice. Contributors do more than deconstruct this theory; they tackle what comes next. Having established the genealogy and effects of pluralism, they generate new questions for engaging the collective worlds and multiple registers in which religion operates.

PART I

Law, Normativity, and the Constitution of Religion

1. ETHICS AFTER PLURALISM

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

It seems there could not be a better time to consider the status of pluralism, particularly of religious pluralism, in the United States. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 has been taken by some commentators to mean that the United States is “post-racial” and perhaps we could say “post-pluralism,” given Obama’s multiracial parentage and extended family as formed by his siblings. However, other commentators, such as former CNN host Lou Dobbs, continue to complain about the supposedly lenient policies of the U.S. government toward immigration, and immigration reform is not a policy on which the Obama administration is moving quickly. Rather, immigration reform seems to be one of the policies that, though no longer a hot issue, is still considered politically volatile and hence to be approached with caution by the highly pragmatic Obama administration. In the academic world, we see a similar divide between commentators who take the increasing demographic diversity of the American populace as evidence enough that pluralism has (or will) triumph, and those such as the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington (2004), who argued that the United States should act to protect the singularity of its cultural heritage by openly recognizing and supporting a dominant—Protestant—identity and culture, particularly against the threat posed by Latino immigration.¹ In some ways it seems that we in the United States are not “after pluralism”; rather, we have yet to reach any agreement that pluralism is possible or, for some like Dobbs, Huntington, and their followers, desirable.

If this is the current state of things, in the United States at least, what does it mean to be “after pluralism”? As Pamela Klassen and Courtney Bender note in the introduction to this volume, the “after” indicates a number of different aspects of the times in which we find ourselves. We are “after” the moment in which the discourse of pluralism has become part of mainstream political discourse, as have its ethical imperatives, which involve a commitment to democratic engagement across differences. And yet we have also reached a point where it may be necessary to recognize that the spread of the discourse of pluralism has not produced the realization of its ethical promises. To be “after pluralism” is to recognize the value of social difference to democratic ethics but also to recognize that neither the demographic fact of pluralism nor its meaningful invocation by advocates of pluralist ethics has produced the United States as a society in which differences are recognized with equality rather then taken as markers of inequality, in which segregation in housing, schooling, and labor markets does not continue to be the order of the day, and in which the mainstream has moved much beyond token recognition of difference, particularly of religious difference.² The question that Klassen and Bender put to us is not whether public recognition of religious difference is desirable or even whether it is a central part of democracy but whether the model of pluralism is the best route for the realization of that much-desired recognition.

THE PROBLEM OF PLURALISM

One of the fundamental problems for the realization of these democratic goals is that the model of pluralism often presumes clearly delineated “units” of religious difference, most often located in well-recognized institutions of religious tradition with identifiable authorities who speak for the members of said tradition. Thus the model of pluralism can fail to recognize both diversity within religious traditions and forms of religious difference that do not fit this model of organization, for example, those that are not organized around authorities who can act as spokespersons, that are not institutionalized in recognizable (and hierarchical) structures, and that are delineated by practice or land rather than by beliefs about which one might speak. Moreover, as Andrea Most (chap. 5, this volume) shows, the boundaries between different traditions are often quite permeable and are perhaps more accurately described as mutually constitutive than as pluralistic.

I am wholly in sympathy with this critique, having argued in my first book on feminist alliance politics (Jakobsen 1998) that it is precisely the assumption of separable “units” of difference, whether delineated along lines of race, class, or religion, that undercuts the possibilities for connection and understanding across difference so often sought by advocates of alliances (and of pluralism). The analytic problem is clear enough: Pluralism does not adequately describe the complexity of religious differences. Because it obscures both internal diversity and external connections, pluralism cannot provide an adequate model for those hoping to improve interactions.

The ethical problem, which has long been my concern, follows from this analytic problem. The promise of democracy is that people in their differences can come together and through nonviolent interaction move forward on public issues. Yet if religious differences block public participation—if the representation of a plurality of religious participants in the public sphere is not possible, for example—then the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled.

Yet when we imagine the public sphere as divided into “units” of difference, we tend to undercut the possibilities for interaction that might actually facilitate democratic processes. We are trapped between a politics of representation in which we try (and repeatedly fail) to find the perfect formula for providing representation to any and all groups (or groups within groups) and a politics of blindness to differences—in other words, between the difficulties of identity politics and the historic failures of acting as though social differences do not exist or do not matter. So with religious pluralism, for example, how do we fully represent religious differences in the public sphere? Who are the appropriate representatives of religious communities? The institutional leaders of those communities? Charismatic leaders? Someone else? And if those leaders also happen to be all men or all of one race, who represents the racial minorities or women of this group? The traditional leaders? Those who are not directly represented but who agree with the leaders? Those who disagree?³ In other words, crosscutting differences make it difficult if not impossible to use a unit of identity (whatever that unit might be) to find a means of representing everyone.

Does this failure mean that we should (and could) all just represent ourselves as individuals?⁴ Among other problems, this approach would tend to erase the serious and continuing exclusions that group identities, including religious differences, have created in U.S. public life. For example, although Barack Obama’s election to the presidency represents a truly significant change in the racial politics of American democracy, his Christian identity was crucial to the possibility of his election. Unfounded rumors circulated throughout the campaign that he was secretly a Muslim, and although his supporters repeatedly denied these rumors, neither the campaign nor these supporters raised the question of why it might be such a problem that a Muslim would be running for president of the United States of America.

In the post–September 11 atmosphere, where many Americans continue to identify Islam as a legitimating force in the attacks, perhaps it’s obvious why a Muslim cannot now be elected president of the United States, but that “obviousness” points to an even deeper problem facing the ethical vision of pluralism.⁵ For some, including analysts such as Huntington, the events of the past decade have raised or renewed the question of whether adherents to multiple religious perspectives can even live together in peace. This focus on violence was set off not just by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the resultant proclamation of a “clash of civilizations” but also by the bombings of July 7, 2005, in London, in which the bombers had grown up in and were fully a part of a supposedly pluralistic Britain.

Enter secularism. Secularism was invented—or so the story goes—to solve the problem of violence emanating from pluralistic religious viewpoints. As one prominent version of the secularization thesis goes, it was the European “wars of religion” produced by the Protestant Reformation that eventually made clear the need for a social space not determined by any particular religion, within which different religious traditions could coexist peaceably.⁶ The secular framework that was created by what is called the separation of church and state allows for religious pluralism by providing a framework within which different voices can interact. Because secularism is not expressive of any particular religious voice, it can provide the framework for general interaction, interaction that in moral terms is undertaken through the protocols of universal reason. Public deliberation and debate, then, can take place under terms that can be universally shared regardless of the particular religious commitments of the participants. And interaction can take place peacefully. Decisions can be made not by the force of violence but by the “force of the better argument” (Habermas 1984:87) in situations of open communication and free expression.

This is a very powerful story, one that has had powerful effects in our world, leading to repeated telling of the story.⁷ And this story is deeply entwined with the problem of pluralism. If there is no general secular discourse within which pluralistic religious voices can interact, then how can the moral promises of pluralism, including peaceful coexistence, be realized? And yet, as a spate of recent scholarship has shown, there are serious reasons to doubt that secularism can provide the type of framework for interaction on which pluralism depends.⁸

In Secularisms (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008), an anthology produced from a project that brought together scholars working on secularism in various parts of the world, my co-editor, Ann Pellegrini, and I have asked whether secularism is general after all or whether there are particular secularisms. For example, Ann and I are Americanists, and can one really say that public secularism in the United States, especially the secularism of the state that is supposed to be so separate from the church, is general? Or is it a particular form of secularism, one that both expresses and enacts in law the values of Protestantism that have so long been dominant in U.S. history?⁹ In our study of sexual regulation in the United States (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2003), which we pursued parallel to the secularisms project, we found that, at least when it comes to sexual regulation, the basis of U.S. law is almost always and everywhere, whether in the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of government, based on Christian values.¹⁰ And the political affiliation or philosophy of the lawmaker doesn’t much matter in terms of this outcome. Whether it is George W. Bush speaking of his Christian views in a Rose Garden press conference to explain his support of an anti–gay marriage amendment to the Constitution before the 2004 election or the Democratic presidential candidates in that same year and in 2008 trying to explain their stance on gay marriage through their own religiosity; whether it’s Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott proclaiming that as Americans we should “love the sinner and hate the sin” or Democratic Senator Robert Byrd reading from his family Bible on the floor of the Senate in the debate over the Defense of Marriage Act—when it comes to sex, a particular set of Christian assumptions informs the law of the land.

In the secularisms project, we found that this Christian secularism has ramifications that reach far beyond the regulation of sexuality in the United States. With the development of capitalist globalization, it has implications for the structure of life and work globally. With colleagues who work on areas of the world ranging from India to China to Iran to Turkey to Britain and the United States, we found that Christian secularism has global implications in relation to capitalist practice, which perhaps should not surprise us given that of all the calendars in the world, it is the Christian calendar that is the basis of operation for world financial markets.¹¹ But unlike others who understand Christian values to be constitutive of global secularism and who therefore see all secularism and all secularisms as somehow variants of Christianity, we did not find Christian secularism to be the only form of secularism active in the world today. For example, Geeta Patel (2008) offers a meditation on the workings of secularism in India during the government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and she shows how, by suturing Hindu nationalism to Hindu secularism to the secularism of global capitalism, the BJP was able to accomplish the production of India as simultaneously the true site of Hindu identity and an ultramodern capitalist powerhouse. As Banu Subramaniam (2008) shows in her essay on battles over Hindu science and education, the reascension of the Congress Party into government has changed very few aspects of this formation or of the policies associated with it. Even with the ostensibly more secular Congress Party, the governing secularism in India remains a Hindu secularism.¹² Christian secularism may be the dominant secularism in the contemporary world, but it is not the only secularism with world historical consequences.

So if secularism is particular to the context in which it is formed and of a particular form in the global context, what of the story of universal secularism as a framework for religious pluralism? And perhaps even more urgently, what of the moral narrative in which universal reason provides a framework for the peaceful adjudication of moral claims from competing religious traditions? If there is no universal secularism, there is no foundation for universal moral reason, and then there is a moral, as well as a practical, problem. Thus, the problem of pluralism exists on two levels: We cannot assume autonomous units of religious tradition as a basis for pluralistic interaction, and we cannot assume a secular framework that provides general and reasonable rules, rules that because general can be accepted by all no matter their tradition (at least all who are reasonable) so as to maintain peaceful interactions.

GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND ETHICS AS A SITE FOR ALTERNATIVES

As a result, in this chapter I would like to explore possible alternatives to the moral framework offered by the dominant narrative of religious pluralism and its secular framework. To do so, I turn to the realm of sexuality studies and in particular to the possibilities presented by queer ethics. Given that this is not the usual place to turn for an anthology made up of legal scholars and sociologists of religion, let me first explain this particular choice. One of the things that the editors of this book have encouraged us to do is to look to the sites where religious pluralism is actually negotiated in contemporary societies—the law, the media, and the street—and I am happy to take up this encouragement. In nearly all these places, one of the points at which negotiations of difference occur is around issues of gender and sexuality. If one looks at the primary examples of the negotiation of religious difference provided in the initial description of the “After Pluralism” conference, for example, one finds that two of the three cases focus on the institution most associated in our society with gender and sexuality: the family. The organizers rightly point out, “As demonstrated by debates about the uses of Shari’a within Canadian family law, global conflicts over democratic principles of free speech and blasphemy, and government funding of religious family planning groups in the United States, numerous religions share (often uncomfortably) similar economic, legal, and media positions, in both national and global arenas” (Bender ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Habits of Pluralism
• Part I: Law, Normativity, and the Constitution of Religion
• Part II: Performing Religion After Pluralism
• Part III: The Ghosts of Pluralism: Unintended Consequences of Institutional and Legal Constructions
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index