When people ask me what I study they invariably put me to the task of telling them just what it is that I intend to do with a degree in religious studies once I graduate. I tell them this: I want to contribute to an ethos of religious understanding in our religiously complex and confused world.
My rote answer functions for those fragments of interaction with the people I meet from day to day. But it really isn’t sufficient in the end. It doesn’t offer much substance or nuance. It actually forces my listener to fill a rather gaping hole. They have to decide on the definition of “religious understanding”. They have to imagine what it means to respond to religious confusion. I think it’s okay, even important, to raise these sorts of questions. But as a student of religion and an advocate for peaceful engagement across religious and ideological lines of difference, the onus is on me to be more specific and to cast a concrete vision of what an ethos of religious understanding might look like.
That means that I have to do more than simply suggest that religious understanding is a possibility, something that I believe in. I have to address religious confusion head on.
The matrix of religious confusion tends to thicken wherever multiple communities are attempting to put a common resource to divergent uses. Jews and Christians, for instance, share a sacred text. This is a reality that could potentially enrich both communities, but all too often it results in either party claiming that their interpretation is authoritative. This happens between different denominations of a single religion as well. Whenever multiple parties make confident claims about a multivalent source, and when those claims don’t align, it is easier to retreat to the corners and cliques of certainty than it is to continue to engage each other across lines of difference. This blind privileging of one’s religious perspective tends to discount the validity of the religious other. The idolizing of one’s own perspective typically results from a cankerous closed-mindedness.
People suffering from closed-minds do not usually identify with their closed-minds. They identify as a sort of Christian, Muslim, atheist, humanist, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, animist, Pagan, or something else. Closed-minds are dispersed amongst us. Yet I really believe that authentically closed-minded people are a minority. There are Christians who claim their understanding of the Bible is the equivalent to universal truth. And there are Muslims who hold the Qur’an in similar fashion. And humanists who think that their assessment of social or scientific data is incontestable.
And you know what? I think it is important for these people, who purposefully or inadvertently glorify their view while espousing intolerance of others, to be able to openly make their claims. I think it is important for these people to bring their claims of authority into the public square, rather than retreating with them into enclaves of intolerance. They are welcome. I don’t say this because I think the world particularly needs closed-minded representatives from the many religious and ideological traditions. I say this because I think that they need people like me. And people like you. I think they need diversity. Which isn’t to say that I think they need to change their identity, or even concede their fundamentals. I think they can be distinctly themselves without keeping their minds closed to the others with whom they share the world. Encountering others is exactly what these people need. Encountering others in the world has the potential to both open their minds and amplify their identities.
In the chaotic matrix of multi-religious and trans-ideological engagement we are forced awake to the others whom we encounter. In public spaces designed for engagement and disagreement we all hone our identities, holding to those things that enable us to live ethically and creatively, while hopefully dispensing of those things that block our capacity for love and civic survival.
An ethos of religious understanding would look like an open field, wide open, even open to the closed. In the field we would explore personality, identity, and belonging without restraining any of them. We would look curiously and receptively at the others all around us. My vision of religious understanding is not about isolating or defining one religious or sacred truth over another. It is about being in open and confident relationship with others. These relationships are not a context for unilateral conversion; they are a matrix of mutual transformation and personal amplification. But this sort of thing requires that we all show up in the first place.
