There is a tendency to present interreligious dialogue as an inclusive project that seeks to dismantle patterns of exclusion and to establish a sense of community between people who orient around religion differently. Dialogue, thus understood, is about both respecting and transgressing boundaries. Those committed to interreligious engagement tend to position themselves on the ‘right side of history,’ i.e. on the side of emancipation from religious bias and oppression. Does the tendency to think about dialogue in terms of inclusion, openness, and solidarity across difference, however, limit the critical potential of the so-called “interfaith movement?" Does it occlude self-examination of mutual elitisms that may arise among dialogue partners?
This paper analyzes how the Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial women-only congregation in Los Angeles, commits to interfaith activism despite a sociopolitical climate of Islamophobia that undermines its efforts. The WMA is continuous with post-9/11 trends to promote US interreligious dialogue, yet many American Muslims view interfaith activism as suspect. Their suspicions are rooted in the politicization of interfaith activism as an extension of government surveillance programs like CVE; or at best, as a part of an ongoing process of reconstructing American Muslims into respectable American religious subjects who conform to white middle-class Protestant values. Conversely, other American religious groups challenge interfaith engagement by excluding Muslims or creating conditional parameters for their inclusion. Nevertheless, organizations like the WMA take up the task of interreligious dialogue both as a means to address religious bigotry and because of the uneven power dynamics that compel them to do so.
In this paper, I coin the notion of ‘dialogic innocence’ to capture a key problem that limits the critical and inclusive potential of the so-called interfaith movement. Dialogical innocence feeds on the “refusal of race” (Heng 2018, 4), which not only destigmatizes the history of religious prejudice, but can also limit interlocutors in their capacity of taking an explicitly anti-racist stance when faced with contemporary expressions of racialization, like Islamophobia. To deepen the critical potential of dialogue, the first essential step is to develop a critical historical consciousness (Joshi 2020) and understand how the “the refusal of race” is woven into the history of the interfaith movement (Hill Fletcher 2017). In brief, we need to start changing the ‘frame’ that separates religion and race, which means challenging some of the normative assumptions that underpin the interfaith movement, especially as they pertain to the religio-racial constellation.
How do secular Jews or Christians fit into in dialogue programs? How well are women, minorities, or queer individuals included in Jewish-Catholic dialogue? What role can and should converts play in interreligious dialogue? What about patrilineal Jews? How are the rich and diverse internal diversities of both Christianity and Judaism included in the dialogue?
What is lost or gained? How does our construct of both our own religion and that of our dialogue partner take an alternate form due to who is included or excluded? How does it reify or shift power and meaning within the communities involved?
These are just some of the questions that the Network of Young Scholars in Jewish-Christian Dialogue at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg have taken up in the past year. Come join this session to hear more on our answers and the questions we are left with.