A Case for Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy

Abstract

Cross-cultural religious literacy is a comprehensive approach to understanding and conducting the kind of engagement that distinguishes robust, covenantal pluralism from merely indifferent “tolerance” of diversity. Such an approach teaches, respectively, the personal and comparative competencies of knowledge about self, and about the other, as well as the collaborative context in which this knowledge is applied. This approach also teaches the skills—evaluation, negotiation, and communication—of moving toward the other such that shared goals can be identified and implemented.

Keywords:

• religious literacy
• cross-cultural
• pluralism
• engagement
• multi-faith
• evaluation
• negotiation
• communication

It was never our intention to go to Pakistan. But one day, in the fall of 2003, the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE), where we both worked and are still affiliated, received a guest who asked: “I don't know what you do—I think you build bridges—but how would you like to travel to Peshawar, Pakistan, and engage the newly elected Chief Minister of the Northwest Frontier Province?”¹ It would have been easy to say no. IGE was only three years old. As a think-and-do-tank, IGE was busy building new educational programs while also building relationships that would eventually yield forums across Asia on religion and the rule of law, security, and citizenship. And we had just founded The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

Chris sought some advice. Early in 2004, Chris had lunch with Akbar Ahmed, the longtime Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor of International Relations at American University. When asked how to think about this opportunity to expand IGE's work to Pakistan, particularly the area along the Afghanistan border between Peshawar and Bannu where he had served as a Pakistani civil servant, Akbar replied: “I’ve been a Pashtun for 3,000 years, a Muslim for 1,400, and a Pakistani for 57.”

Akbar's point was succinct and profound. Akbar knew who he was. He was fluent in his culture, his faith, and his country—across time and space. Were we literate in who we were, much less the peoples of the Northwest Frontier, and their faith traditions? Could we understand ourselves, and could we muster the will and skills to truly understand the Pashtun Muslim people of Pakistan?

Akbar was saying that to engage the Pashtun-Muslim culture in Northwest Pakistan successfully—that is, to develop and implement sustainable projects, together—we would need much more than good intentions, much more than surface level familiarity with the country. As with any engagement, we would have to review motivations and interests, ours, and theirs. We had to think through what we thought about ourselves, and what we believed about engaging a people and culture so different than our own. We also had to think about those people and their culture, and how they understood themselves; and, how they understood engaging a people and culture so different than their own. And then, as a result, we had to think through what goals we might develop and implement with them.

We had the will to develop a deepening competency about ourselves, the Pashtuns, and what we might do together; but, frankly, we did not have the skills. In his first meeting with the Chief Minister of the Northwest Frontier Province, Chris found himself asking: “Why do you do what you do?” The Chief Minister responded: “I believe that the Creator will hold me accountable for the way I govern my people.” Chris did not expect that answer, let alone concurring that he believed the same thing too (even though he also knew that he had serious theological and political differences with the Chief Minister). But there Chris was: totally unprepared to evaluate, negotiate, and/or communicate the moment, because he did not have the skills to be competent in himself, the other, and what might be done together.

And so began a learning process that continues to this day. Chris eventually made several trips to Pakistan, making many friends, with whom IGE subsequently worked on various innovative projects (e.g. a fellows program at the University of Science and Technology in Bannu). This process of partnership took place faster because both parties sought to know their own faith and culture at their richest and deepest best, and enough about the other's faith and culture to demonstrate genuine respect (not merely “tolerance”) for the essence of the other's identity. This respect was for each other's inherent dignity, and genuinely held beliefs (while not implying any blanket endorsement of the other's beliefs). Across different ethnic and political cultures, as well as irreconcilable theological differences, they learned how to agree to disagree, agreeably, and therefore how to work together, practically.

This model and mindset, encouraged by similar experiences in other countries, set the organizing pattern for IGE's work in its early years, and continues to guide its work in challenging contexts around the world—China, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Northern Iraq, and parts of Northern and Eastern Africa—as well as its Center for Women, Faith & Leadership, which ensures that gender is an integral dimension of IGE's engagement in each place. In each of these situations, the key has always been the same: seeking first to understand the essence of one's own, as well as the other's, identity before engaging to create a relationship capable of discovering common values, and common interests, pursuant a common project.

IGE did not use the phrase “cross-cultural religious literacy” to describe what it was doing, but, in reflection, it is a phrase that captures the core of IGE's ethos and methodology of engagement. As our writings and conferences suggest across IGE's first 20 years, we were and continue to constantly assess and analyze ourselves, as well as our potential partners and their context, before applying ideas developed together. We have also sought to equip others worldwide, of any religion or no religion, to similarly consider and include religion—in their academic disciplines and professional sectors—at least as an analytic factor, understanding that religion can potentially be, depending on the context, a tremendous force for good, or ill.²

Global Context

Scholarly specialists in religious studies have of course long argued for the value of education about comparative religion. But it wasn't until after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that a broader sense of urgency about religious literacy began to take root. Moreover, the processes of globalization—and reactions to those processes—over the ensuing two decades have only further heightened the need for cross-cultural religious literacy across virtually every sector of society and governance, domestically and transnationally.

Globalization is many things, but it seems to have two primary, sometimes countervailing, effects. First, and most practically, globalization creates or exacerbates problems that can only be solved through broad-based partnership. Today's interrelated global challenges—from trade to terrorism, climate change to counterproliferation, development to deterrence, and health(care) to human rights—demand different perspectives, as well as different partnerships among individuals and institutions that will not share the same faith background or worldview orientation. We believe that in a world where no global challenge can be solved by a single state or non-state actor, it is not a question of if but when you partner with an individual or institution that does not think, act, or believe as you do.

In other words, no matter our different spiritual epistemologies and/or ethical frameworks, it is in our collective self-interest to find a way to work together. Which is also to say—consciously or sub-consciously—each of us will possess a different point of moral departure that de facto exercises a philosophy of the other in building practical partnerships. Our global engagement pursuant our self-interest cannot help but reflect what we believe about someone else, a needed partner, who doesn't believe as we do.

Globalization's second effect is its constant impact on identity. The continuous transfer of information and increase in mobility accelerated by globalization inevitably challenges how we understand and conceive of ourselves, the other, and the world. In the best of circumstances, encounter and principled engagement with different religious and philosophical frameworks strengthens our identity as we consider teachings and thinking that, despite differences, can anchor our spiritual/moral identity in the other (i.e. the Golden Rule).

But we also know that information can be manipulated to play upon and/or create real and alleged threats to our identity. Much too often, sadly, people cannot live out their identity because their beliefs are construed as a threat. Annually since 2007 the Pew Research Center has been measuring government restrictions on religion around the world. In 2018 (the most recent year for which full data are available), religious restrictions reached an all-time high (Pew Research Center 2020). The total number of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions also increased, rising from 52 in 2017 to 56 in 2018. Pew also reports an index of social hostilities involving religion. In 2018 this index was down slightly—but only after having reached an all-time high in 2017.

Given such repression and hostility it is perhaps not surprising that our world is now experiencing the most displaced people since World War II. According to the United Nations, over 80 million people have been displaced from their home (UNHCR 2020). Too often, people are fleeing conflict where religion has seemingly been used to validate the power of one group (often the ethno-religious majority) against another (usually ethno-religious minorities) (Theodorou 2014; see also Falk 2019 and C. Seiple 2016).

These two combined and countervailing effects of globalization—a need for partnership when we are unwilling (no will) and/or unable (no skills) to partner because of (perceived) threats to our respective identities—yield a world of conceptual, geographic, and spiritual disruption and dislocation. It is hard to work together when our identity is defined against, and/or as under threat from, the other. Inevitably, people suffer, ask why, and yearn for meaning.

Globally, religion remains a pervasive force, one that can be used for good and bad. As such, the stakes for cross-cultural religious literacy, and illiteracy, are high. As Stephen Prothero, a leader in the field of religious literacy, has written: “religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture, because religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil” (Prothero 2007, 17).³

The Emerging Field of Religious Literacy

In the American context, the field of religious literacy crossed a threshold of public awareness in 2007, with the publication of several key books. The most widely cited is the New York Times bestselling Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know About Religion—But Doesn't, by Prothero. Prothero wrote Religious Literacy “to produce citizens who know enough about Christianity and the world's religions to participate meaningfully—on both the left and the right—in religiously inflected public debates.” His was not a favoritism of Christianity but simply a naming of a fact: various understandings of Christianity played an instrumental role in the founding and evolution of the United States. One cannot, Prothero argued, be a fully engaged citizen of the U.S. unless one is functionally literate about its history, a history which Biblical diction and theological doctrine played a vital part in shaping (and still does). Prothero defined religious literacy as “the ability to understand and use in one's day-to-day life the basic building blocks of religious traditions—key terms, symbols, doctrines, practices, sayings characters, metaphors, and narratives” (Prothero 2007, 12).

Diane Moore—another leader in the emergent field of religious literacy—agrees that facts about religion are important, and that they should be taught in America's public schools (also for the sake of citizenship). But she felt it imperative to add that facts about religion do not exist in isolation. They should be situated and understood in context. For example, an understanding of suffering is instrumental to the Christian faith; but that understanding, and how it shapes eventual application, will likely differ according to the socio-cultural and historical contexts of whether the group of believers is part of the ethnic majority or minority (e.g. white and black churches in America). Moreover, these contexts also had to be taught, and how they were taught must be given conscious and ongoing reflection.

In her 2007 book, Overcoming Religious Illiteracy: A Cultural Studies Approach to the Study of Religion in Secondary Education, Moore made a threefold case for the multi-disciplinary approach of cultural studies and its effort to name the relevant lenses, situated facts, and inherent biases. This holistic approach (Moore 2007, 5) assumes that:

• “[W]ithout a basic understanding of the beliefs, symbols, literature, and practices related to the world's religious traditions, much of history and culture is rendered incomprehensible. Religion has always been and continues to be woven into the fabric of cultures and civilizations in ways that are inextricable. The failure to recognize this fact impoverishes our understanding of human experience and sends the false message that religion is primarily an individual as opposed to a social phenomenon.”

• “[R]eligious worldviews provide alternative frameworks from which to critique normative cultural assumptions. … [T]he study of religion can serve to enhance rather than thwart critical thinking and cultural imagination regarding human agency and capacity.”

• “[K]nowledge of the basic tenets and structures of the world's religions is essential to a functioning democracy in our increasingly pluralistic age.”

Moore (2007, 56) went on to define religious literacy as

the ability to discern and analyze the fundamental intersections of religion and social/political/cultural life through multiple lenses. Specifically, a religiously literate person will possess (1) a basic understanding of the history, central texts, beliefs, practices, and contemporary manifestations of several of the world's religious traditions as they arose out of and continue to be shaped by particular social, historical, and cultural contexts; and (2) the ability to discern and explore the religious dimensions of political, social, and cultural expressions across time and place … This understanding of religious literacy emphasizes a method of inquiry more than specific content knowledge, though familiarity with historical manifestations is an important foundation for understanding the intersections of religion with other dimensions of human social life.

These influential writings set the pattern for what followed in the emerging field of religious literacy: an American K-12 emphasis on understanding the other, but not necessarily the (role of) self during engagement of the other. For example, also in 2007, the First Amendment Center published Finding Common Ground: A First Amendment Guide to Religion and Public Schools (Haynes and Thomas 2007). They argued that general education is woefully incomplete without imparting at least basic knowledge of religion, and they challenged the widespread misunderstanding of the Constitutional separation of church and state as somehow barring teaching about religion (from a nonsectarian point of view).

In 2010 the American Academy of Religion (AAR) issued its Guidelines for Teaching about Religion in K-12 Public Schools in the United States. Produced by an AAR task force chaired by Diane Moore, the Guidelines articulated its rationale for religious literacy education as follows: “Illiteracy regarding religion (1) is widespread, (2) fuels prejudice and antagonism, and (3) can be diminished by teaching about religion in public schools using a non-devotional, academic perspective, called religious studies” (AAR Religion in the Schools Task Force 2010). Building on this achievement, in 2011 Moore began laying the groundwork for a Religious Literacy Project based at Harvard Divinity School.

In 2015, Adam Dinham and Matthew Francis published their edited book, Religious Literacy in Policy and Practice, in which they argued (Dinham and Francis 2015, 257, 266, 270) that religious literacy “is a stretchy, fluid concept that is variously configured and applied in terms of the context in which it happens … [R]eligious literacy is necessarily a non-didactic idea that must be adapted as appropriate to the specific environment.” They further concluded that

religious literacy lies in having the knowledge about at least some religious traditions, and an awareness of and ability to find out about others. Its purpose is to avoid stereotypes, engage, respect, and learn from others, and build good relations across difference. In this it is a civic endeavor rather than a religious one, and seeks to support a strong multifaith society, that is inclusive of people from all faith traditions and none, within a context that is largely suspicious and anxious about religion and belief … . [emphasis added]

Accordingly, religious literacy “is best understood as a framework to be worked out in context. In this sense, it is better to talk of religious literacies in the plural than literacy in the singular.”

Also in 2015, Moore founded the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School, which among other things has sought to apply religious literacy in various professional fields, running symposia on topic areas such as media and entertainment, journalism, immigration services, and humanitarian action. For example, a 2017 study with Oxfam looked at the religious literacy of faith-based relief & development NGOs (Gingerich et al. 2017). Moore also added the consideration of “power and powerlessness” to her method for exploring religious literacy, suggesting that questions had to be asked about “which perspectives are politically and socially prominent,” and why (Moore 2015).

In 2017, the U.S. National Council for Social Studies, through the support of the AAR and the Religious Freedom Center, added religious studies to its “C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards” (National Council for Social Studies 2017). Reflecting on this Framework, Religious Freedom Center Director (at the time) Charles Haynes remarked:

Religious literacy is critical for sustaining the American experiment in religious liberty and diversity. Only by educating students about religions and beliefs in ways that are constitutionally and academically sound can the United States continue to build one nation out of many cultures and faiths. (National Council for Social Studies n.d.)

In 2018 the emerging field of religious literacy began to consider global application, as well as the role of the one seeking religious literacy about the other. The Religious Freedom Center's Benjamin Marcus, for example, warned against a linguistic mirror-imaging of the religious other while engaging him/her. Marcus (2018) noted that “Americans read the world fluently using their own religious language, but many are incapable of understanding the language of the religious other in public life.” To truly understand and respect the other “requires the ability to parse religious language and to analyze how individuals and communities value each component with their religious identities.”

Religious literacy education has also begun to expand beyond K-12 to address higher education. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen pointed the way in their important 2012 book, No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education. One example of the growing interest in religious literacy at the university level came in January of 2018, when Chris taught “Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy & Leadership in an Age of Partnership” for the first time at the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies. This class resulted from Chris’ experiences at IGE as well as a “Bridging the Gap” grant from the Carnegie Endowment meant to help the academy become more relevant to policymakers. Through this class, and his work with the Templeton Religion Trust, Chris began to think through how religious literacy begins with the self, and how it is applied globally with the other, in different contexts (See C. Seiple 2018a, 2018b). In March 2019, the University of Washington Board of Regents unanimously approved “Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy” as a graduate certificate.⁴

The recognition of religious literacy as a priority in higher education took another step forward in November 2019, when the AAR published its “Religious Literacy Guidelines: What U.S. College Graduates Need to Know about Religion.” Echoing the catalytic work of Diane Moore, who co-chaired the report, the AAR (2019) states:

Religious literacy helps us understand ourselves, one another, and the world in which we live. It includes the abilities to:

• Discern accurate and credible knowledge about diverse religious traditions and expressions

• Recognize the internal diversity within religious traditions

• Understand how religions have shaped—and are shaped by—the experiences and histories of individuals, communities, nations, and regions

• Interpret how religious expressions make use of cultural symbols and artistic representations of their times and contexts

• Distinguish confessional or prescriptive statements made by religions from descriptive or analytical statements

Later, in Appendix B of the guidelines, the AAR, taking more notice of the person seeking to engage the religious other, defined religious literacy as

the ability to discern and analyze the role of religion in personal, social, political, professional, and cultural life. Religious literacy fosters the skills and knowledge that enable graduates to participate—in informed ways—in civic and community life; to work effectively and collaboratively in diverse contexts; to think reflectively about commitments to themselves and others; and to cultivate self-awareness.

In October 2020, Moore also launched the Master of Religion and Public Life degree program at Harvard Divinity School to “advance the public understanding of religion in service of a just world at peace.”⁵

Implications

By way of summary thus far, there are several dimensions to “religious literacy” in its fullest sense. The first is recognition of the implicit difference between diversity and pluralism. Diversity is the presence of difference. It is side-by-side tolerance. Diana Eck, director of the Harvard Pluralism Project, writes:

Pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. Today, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. (Eck n.d.)

The second key element, accordingly, is engagement. If we want to move beyond tolerance, we will need the will and skills to engage. Engagement requires an understanding of the other's motivations and interests, and some self-awareness of one's own. Engaging a religious actor is no different than engaging a secular one—the process still requires an understanding of what you and the other party seek, and why. “Religious literacy” at the least is a tool for understanding the religious other. Certainly, Prothero, Moore, and Marcus, among others, would begin there.

But, it is also true that most writers would agree that context is at the heart of “religious literacy” as a means to understanding, if not application. Judgment and flexibility are therefore vital characteristics, as individuals, situations, and contexts vary. (Flexibility is also important because, as the above survey indicates, religious literacy itself is an evolving concept.) And if religious literacy is context-dependent, then it is inevitably also about relationships. Such extrapolative logic suggests that the religious literacy necessary to engage the other requires multi-level and multi-directional understanding—including understanding of the situation and place, and, understanding of oneself, as one comes into relationship with the other and the place.

Religious literacy, therefore, is relational even as it implicitly, given the many unknowns, demands a humble approach in its desire to cross from mere tolerance of diversity to proactive and nonrelativistic pluralism, through mutual engagement. In fact, it is a civic responsibility. In his discussion of “deep pluralism,” William Connolly (2005, 64–65) writes:

In the ideal case each faith thereby embeds the religious virtue of hospitality and the civic virtue of presumptive generosity into its relational practices. It inserts relational modesty into its ritual practices to amplify one side of its own faith—the injunction to practice hospitality toward other faiths coexisting with it—and to curtail pressures within it to repress or marginalize other faiths. To participate in the public realm does not now require you to leave your faith at home in the interests of secular reason (or one of its surrogates); it involves mixing into the relational practice of faith itself a preliminary readiness to negotiate with presumptive generosity and forbearance in those numerous situations where recourse to the porous rules of commonality across faiths, public procedure, reason, or deliberation are insufficient to the issue at hand … 

Negotiation of such an ethos of pluralism, first, honors the embedded character of faith; second, gives expression to a fugitive element of care, hospitality, or love for differences simmering in most faiths; third, secures specific faiths against persecution; and, fourth, offers the best opportunity for diverse faiths to coexist without violence while supporting the civic conditions of common governance. It does not issue in a simple universalism in which one image of transcendence sets the standard everywhere or in a cultural relativism in which one faith prevails here and another there. It is neither universalism nor relativism in the simple mode of each. It is deep pluralism.

Such an interconnected web of relationships between and among religious (and non-religious) people requires, as Connolly emphasizes, the skill of negotiation. Negotiation, however, begins with the skill of evaluation (i.e. the capacity to assess and analyze the various dynamics at play); and commences and ends with the skill of communication (how something is said, or not said, is often more important than what is said). This web of relationships also requires, as Connolly suggests, the best of one's values, as well as a keen understanding of the power dynamics at play (which can result in violence, if not managed properly).

Certainly this has been our experience in our work with IGE over the years. We always found good people everywhere, engaging according to the best of their faith and conscience, and as a civic responsibility, living out the values of charity, hospitality, and respect toward the (religious) other. But it is also true that we always found contentious issues that invariably pointed back to the local power dynamic between the ethnic and/or religious majority and the ethnic and/or religious minorities. For example, access to education, worship, and good development were often part and parcel of the majority-minority power relationship. A holistic approach to religious literacy requires situated knowledge—a knowledge that is not only academic but also contextual and relational.

Of course, such dynamics are part of the human condition. James C. Scott's important scholarship on the history of the people of upland Southeast Asia provides vivid examples of such majority-minority power relations. In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott (2009, 13, 19, 20, 27, 155, 158, 337) writes:

The attempt to bring the periphery into line is read by representatives of the sponsoring state as providing civilization and progress—where progress is, in turn, read as the intrusive propagation of the linguistic, agricultural, and religious practices of the dominant ethnic group: the Han, the Kinh, the Burman, the Thai … . In the precolonial period, the resistance can be seen in a cultural refusal of lowland patterns and in the flight of lowlanders seeking refuge in the hills … . The hills, however, are not simply a space of political resistance but also a zone of cultural refusal … . Treatment of lowland cultures and societies as self-contained entities (for example, “Thai civilization,” “Chinese culture”) replicates the unreflective structure of scholarship and, in doing so, adopts the hermetic view of culture that lowland elites themselves wish to project. The fact is that hill and valley societies have to be read against each other to make any sense … . The religious “frontier” beyond which orthodoxy could not easily be imposed was therefore not so much a place or defined border as it was a relation to power—that varying margin at which state power faded appreciably … Religious identity in this case is a self-selected boundary-making device designed to emphasize political and social difference …  The valley imagination has its history wrong. Hill peoples are not pre-anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate. They represent, in the longue durée, a reactive and purposeful statelessness of peoples who have adapted to a world of states while remaining outside their firm grasp. [emphasis added]

Nuanced understandings of power dynamics (including racial dynamics), and how they impact local self-understanding, are essential to meaningful mutual engagement. Put differently, Scott's description of lowland and highland Southeast Asia suggests the kind of questions that a holistic approach to religious literacy must ask of the context, and the potential partners involved, ever appreciating the situated knowledge, as well as one's own self-understanding, and the interaction between them. In short: it's complicated, fluid, and evolving.

From Academic to Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy: Competencies & Skills

Cross-cultural religious literacy demands that one be reflective about one's philosophy/theology of the other, toward practical and positive engagement in a multi-faith, globalizing world that will require multi-faith partners to serve the common good. Put simply, we must first understand ourselves (a personal competency), then understand others as they understand themselves (a comparative competency), and then understand the nature and requirements of leadership in crossing cultural and religious barriers for the sake of practical collaboration, which tends to yield civic solidarity (a collaborative competency).

Moreover, it is important to recognize that these competencies are not linear and, in fact, feed from and help form each other. Indeed, one often only begins to discover self through the engagement of the other. In our experience, the other is not necessarily met initially out of altruistic desire, but often out of the practical self-interest of a common challenge. It is the human condition that the heart follows the hands of hard work, before the head finally agrees. Stereotypes are sometimes only overcome through the humanizing of work together.

Personal Competency

To have “personal competency” is to understand one's own moral, epistemological, and spiritual framework—to include one's own (holy) texts (and/or oral traditions) and what they say about engaging the other. It also includes understanding how and why one's own character develops, and deepens. As noted above, traditional religious literacy literature often under-emphasizes the self as a starting point, if it is included at all. As Lenn Goodman (2014, 1, 3) astutely observes, self-knowledge is essential to authentic engagement and dialogue.

[Fruitful dialogue demands] knowing something about who we are ourselves, what we believe and care about, and how what is other actually is other. Without the discipline of self-knowledge to complement our curiosity, interest collapses into mere projection and conjecture … The self-knowledge that pluralism demands is hard won. It means coming to peace with oneself, reconciling one's heritage with one's personal outlook and existential insights, and integrating oneself in a community even as one differentiates oneself from it … Tolerance is the minimum demand of pluralism in any healthy society. Religious tolerance does not mean homogenizing. Pluralism preserves differences. What it asks for is respect.

Comparative Competency

To have “comparative competency” is to understand the moral, epistemological, and spiritual framework of one's neighbor as s/he does, and what that framework says about engaging the other. This dimension of religious literacy includes the range of topics that would typically be covered in a religious studies course in comparative religion. However, we would also stress the crucial importance of developing an understanding of the lived religion of the religious other, in a particular place. Put another way, what are the thresholds in the moral framework of the other that allow one to belong to a particular group and/or place? In asking this question, we are especially mindful that the things that are genuinely meaningful in one's walk of faith do not necessarily comport precisely with that's religion's official doctrines.

Collaborative Competency

By “collaborative competency” we mean knowledge of the particular place where two (or more) different moral frameworks, usually informed by different religions, meet as two individuals and/or institutions that also have to accomplish a specific task. Collaborative competency is understanding the spiritual, ethnic, and/or organizational cultures relevant to developing and implementing a project or program together. A collaborative competency takes place when different individuals/institutions move from side-by-side tolerance (diversity), to self- and other-awareness, to mutual engagement (the heart of a healthy kind of pluralism). Crossing into the context of the other always respects the lived reality of a particular place, situating the partnership and resulting projects within the spiritual, secular, ethnic, and organizational cultures of the partners involved, while also recognizing the power dynamics that are present.

The prepared movement toward another is the moment of application. And that moment of crossing toward the other is not only engagement, but also leadership, as both parties will have to fashion shared goals that can accomplish the task at hand, and speak to the various government and civil society stakeholders (some, even many, of whom will not be religious).

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However, in addition to the above competencies, engagement and leadership also require specific skills—skills informed by historical experience and precedents of multi-faith endeavors. If there is a will to learn how to think conceptually about this process, then there must also be skills that train about what to do in specific contexts. These skills not only help build personal, comparative, and collaborative competencies, they are transferrable to any vocation, or location. They are critical to the process of assessing and analyzing within the three competencies to include their combined application. Based on our global engagement experience, there are three basic skill sets that are particularly helpful in any situation: evaluation, negotiation, and communication.

Evaluation

The evaluation process takes specific account of self, as well as the other, according to the context in which the relevant parties are seeking to implement their shared goals. Evaluation understands that the role of religion takes place simultaneously—internally, and externally—along the same continuum: as one analytic factor among many, to a force that can have tremendous impact for good or ill. Internally, evaluation considers one's own character and beliefs, especially one's concept of the other, as well as unknown biases. Externally, evaluation seeks to accurately name and understand the role of religion in a given, multi-layered context, pursuant prosocial effect.

Negotiation

As one evaluates self, other, and the context of application, one prepares to engage cross-culturally, i.e. to build and lead the necessary partnerships. At every step of this process, negotiation takes place, internally, and externally. Internally, one cannot help but (re)consider one's own identity through the encounter of different beliefs, cultures, and peoples. Meanwhile, externally, there is a job to do. How well that gets done, at some point, is a reflection of the internal process, as well as one's capacity to engage respectfully. Negotiation involves mutual listening and understanding, which, in turn, lead to sustainable action. Communication is the key.

Communication

There are two kinds of communication, verbal and non-verbal. These communications take place across social-cultural-religious and geo-political identities. Communication becomes that much more important in places where things like shame, respect, and family often have a serious and long-standing role. Imperatively, communication begins with listening: within one's own organization, within one's own country, and within the local social-cultural-religious context (from the capital to the province). An elicitive and empathetic ear is crucial to talk that results in trust, trust that leads to tangible results, together.

Conclusion: Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy as a Means to Covenantal Pluralism

Cross-cultural religious literacy is developed through a process of mutual engagement with a religious actor, state or non-state, rooted in an understanding of self, the other's self-understanding, and the objectives at hand in a specific cultural context. But cross-cultural religious literacy is not an end unto itself. Rather it is part of a broader theory of positive change.⁶ In contrast to a religious “literacy” that is only a general knowledge of “facts” about the religions of others, cross-cultural religious literacy is a set of competencies and skills oriented to a normative vision for robust pluralism. A merely technical knowledge of religion will not somehow automatically support greater social flourishing and pluralistic peace. Indeed it is quite possible to combine factual knowledge of religion with illiberal, anti-pluralist sentiment. Familiarity can, unfortunately, breed contempt rather than solidarity. Ours is an era of “democratic recession” (Lovelace 2020) fueled in large part by a religious nationalism that defines the ethno-religious majority against ethno-religious minorities (usually as scapegoats).

As such it is important to place the task of improving religious literacy within a broader normative vision for a form of pluralism that is up to the challenge of our times. We need to be able to answer a basic teleological question: what is cross-cultural religious literacy for?

The answer we propose is this: covenantal pluralism. Cross-cultural religious literacy is a vital means of making progress toward the ideal end-state of covenantal pluralism. “Covenantal pluralism” is an original phrase, first developed by Chris in his work with the Templeton Religion Trust in 2017. However, the ideas are not entirely new. In fact there are many historical precedents. (One 17^th-century example is Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island on a “covenant of peaceable neighborhood” that cherished freedom of conscience; see C. Seiple 2012.)

The phrase “covenantal pluralism” is designed to catalyze and convene new and needed conversations about the world we live in. Covenantal pluralism embodies the humility, patience, empathy, and responsibility to engage, respect, and protect the other—albeit without necessarily lending moral equivalency to the beliefs and behaviors of others (Stewart, Seiple, and Hoover 2020a, 2020b; Joustra 2020, 2021). A pluralism that is “covenantal” is richer and more resilient because it is relational—that is, it is not merely a transactional contract (although relationships often do begin with, and strategies are rooted in, contracts). Covenants, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (2002, 150-151) tells us, are

a bond, not of interest or advantage, but of belonging … [A covenant is] where we develop the grammar and syntax of reciprocity, where we help others and they help us without calculations of relative advantage—where trust is born … Covenants are beginnings, acts of moral engagement. They are couched in broad terms whose precise meaning is the subject of ongoing debate but which stand as touchstones, ideas, reference points against which policies and practices are judged. What we need now is not a contract bringing into being a global political structure, but rather a covenant framing our shared vision for the future of humanity.

Accordingly the concept of covenantal pluralism assumes a holistic top-down and bottom-up approach: it seeks a constitutional framework of equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens under the rule of law (the top-down), as well as a supportive cultural context (the bottom-up), of which religion is often a significant factor.

Cross-cultural religious literacy, then, is not merely a kind of technical expertise, nor merely an attribute of a good general education. Rather it is a set of competencies and skills situated within, and oriented to, a normative vision for robust pluralism. Defined in this way, religious literacy is relevant to much more than just polite “interfaith dialogues” among clergy and theologians. The practice of cross-cultural religious literacy, guided by covenantal pluralism, increases the likelihood that people of profoundly different points of moral and religious departure will nevertheless engage across differences and contribute in practical ways to the common good.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a larger project supported by the Issachar Fund and the Templeton Religion Trust.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Seiple

Chris Seiple (Ph.D., The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy) is President Emeritus of the Institute for Global Engagement and Principal Advisor to the Templeton Religion Trust's Covenantal Pluralism Initiative. A former U.S. Marine infantry officer, he is Senior Fellow for Comparative Religion at the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies. He has previously served as Co-Chair of the U.S. Secretary of State's “Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group” (2011-2013), and as Senior Advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development's Evidence-Based Summit on Strategic Religious Engagement (2020). He is co-editor with Dennis R. Hoover of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Religious Literacy, Pluralism, and Global Engagement.

Dennis R. Hoover

Dennis R. Hoover (D.Phil. Politics, University of Oxford) is Editor of The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Research Advisor to the Templeton Religion Trust's Covenantal Pluralism Initiative, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement. He is editor of Religion and American Exceptionalism (Routledge 2014), co-editor with Chris Seiple and Pauletta Otis of The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Security (Routledge 2013), and co-editor with Douglas Johnston of Religion and Foreign Affairs (Baylor University Press 2012).

Notes

1 The Northwest Frontier Province was renamed as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 2010.

2 For example, publications by IGE staff over its first 20 years include R. Seiple 2004; R. Seiple and Hoover 2004; White 2008; Thames, C. Seiple, and Rowe 2009; Daugherty 2011; Hoover and Johnston 2012; C. Seiple, Hoover, and Otis 2013; Hoover 2014; and many other policy briefings. For more, please see: https://globalengage.org/publications.

3 This article is a slightly edited and abridged version of the introductory chapter in a book we are co-editing. Forthcoming later this year, the book is entitled The Routledge Handbook of Religious Literacy, Pluralism, and Global Engagement.

4 See https://jsis.washington.edu/religion/cross-cultural-religious-literacy-graduate-certificate/.

5 See https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2020/10/15/understanding-religion-and-public-life#:~:text=Harvard%20Divinity%20School%20launched%20this%20week%20Religion%20and,since%20it%20introduced%20the%20master%20of%20theological%20studies.

6 This broader theory of change identifies several key categories of enabling conditions (or “conditions of possibility”) for making progress toward robust, relational, nonrelativistic pluralism. Along with cross-cultural religious literacy, these conditions include freedom of religion and belief, as well the embodiment and expression of essential virtues such as humility and patience. For more, see Stewart, Seiple, and Hoover (2020a).