At the 2003 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Atlanta...

At the 2003 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Atlanta, sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow was asked how he thought faith communities were adapting to religious pluralism in close quarters. He used the metaphor of an elevator: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and the rest of world’s religions are all riding it together. They are increasingly aware of the other people around them, but they are doing just about everything they can to avoid a real interaction.

To deal with the reality inside this “world-elevator,” Diana Eck founded the “Pluralism Project” at Harvard University in 1991 in order to study and document the growing religious diversity of the United States, with a special view to its new immigrant religious communities.

Eck suggests that religious pluralism is only achieved by the intentional and positive engagement of differences.[^3] Mere diversity, Eck maintains, is simply the fact that people from different backgrounds live in proximity to each other. For Eck, pluralism, on the other hand, is when people from different backgrounds seek mutual understanding and positive cooperation with each other. What can scholarship in religious studies offer to the realm of religious pluralism?

Scholars of religious study attempt to gain as comprehensive a view of human thought and action as possible. These scholars are not satisfied with examining only what the social sciences defines as “religion.” Instead, many scholars find religiousness and spirituality expressed in almost all human endeavors.

They move behind, before, beyond, as well as into areas called “religion” in order to encounter those ideas, images, and actions that express the ultimate meaning of existence for people in a certain time and place. Religious studies scholars are concerned with religious ideas, images, and actions regardless of the context in which they may occur.

They examine religious beliefs, commitments, and devotion as part of the comprehensive enterprise of trying to understand how humans express notions of ultimate order and meaning. For them, the issues of power, loyalty, and identity are religious because they pertain to ultimate order and meaning. These are the issues that begin to fashion the religion of the pluralistic culture. They create pluralism because they affirm a set of values beyond traditional allegiances.

Diversity becomes pluralism, creating symbols, ideas, rituals, and myths that maintain the worth of plurality.