What Should We Know about Religions?

Last fall, the Pew Research Center issued a report arguing that most Americans know very little about religions. Many scholars and journalists chimed in to call for the importance of education about religion. These claims aren’t new. They’ve been part of an ongoing discourse on religious literacy and interreligious understanding for years now. As I’ve spent the past decade plus involved in interfaith work and the academic study of religion, I share many of these sentiments.  For those of us who believe that the diversity of religions and cultures in our society ought to be acknowledged and respected as positive aspects of our society, the call for increased religious literacy seems like a no-brainer. How could increased knowledge about religions do anything but help build and strengthen a multicultural society?

Yet, in his recently published essay “The Perils of Pluralism: Colonization and Decolonization in American Indian Religious History” (in After Pluralism, 2010), Tracy Leavelle asks the challenging question, what if some religious communities don’t want to be known? Within the framework of pluralism, Native American religion has been expected to reveal and explain itself in order to engage with other religions. Yet, as Leavelle points out, the assumption that those engaged in pluralistic practices have the right to know other religions is rooted in colonial ideologies.  He posits that “effective colonization relied in part on the power to collect and classify information and to impose clear structures of knowledge and meaning. Europeans (and Americans) acted as if such categories of ‘religion’ and ‘superstition,’ ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ were natural and enduring. Even early historical approaches to the study of difference were assimilationist and hierarchical” (164). Even now, pluralism establishes definitions of acceptable difference. Leavelle concludes with a statement no pluralist would want to hear—that perhaps sometimes dialogue and discussion are not possible

This is difficult. For many of us who promote religious pluralism and religious literacy, we assume that the each of us ought to know the other; that one has the right to know the other. We assume that the pursuit of this knowledge, the construction of this knowledge, will be beneficial and benevolent. We assume the construction of this knowledge will take place on a level playing field, on neutral ground. We may not to acknowledge the power and politics involved in the construction of knowledge, that the acquisition of knowledge for one person may mean the exploitation and violation of another person or group.

Edward Said also makes this point in his seminal text Orientalism (1978). Historically, studying, examining, classifying the ‘other’ served to establish dominance and “to have knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it” particularly when “such a thing” is objectified and viewed as fundamentally stable (36). And this raises the question whether we can ever truly know another. Or more precisely, in our quest to know the ‘other,’  our descriptions and definitions of the ‘other’ may say more about us than about them.

Now, I’m not arguing that religious literacy and education about religion aren’t important. But the pursuit of knowledge is political and involves certain dynamics of power. And if our goal is social harmony and justice, then we must embark upon this pursuit with caution and attentiveness to the balance of power in our endeavors.