Pluralism tour makes a Salt Lake stop

In America we generally don't kill each other over religion. But that doesn't mean we don't have some passionate battles — over whether "God" belongs in the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, or who gets to do what on a stretch of downtown Salt Lake sidewalk.

It is this nuanced tolerance and tension that religious scholars from around the world are studying this summer as they tour four U.S. cities, part of a State Department-funded program called "Religion in the United States: Pluralism and Public Presence."

Salt Lake City is the second stop on the tour that also includes Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Los Angeles was chosen because it is one of the most religiously diverse U.S. cities. Salt Lake City was chosen because, as historian Jan Shipps told the scholars earlier this week, Utah is "the most unpluralistic of all the states."

In the United States as a whole there are at least 200 religions, maybe as many as 2,000 — it all depends on how you count the splinter groups, says Wade Clark Roof, director of the State Department's Fulbright American Studies Institute. Globally there are thousands more, and it's estimated that two or three new religions are created every single day.

In the face of all these varied ways to contemplate the divine, the question, Roof says, is "how do we foster civility, and what does that do to religious traditions?"

The 18 academics who visited Utah this past week come from France, Georgia, Serbia and other countries that struggle to come up with answers. France has made headlines and angered Muslims around the world by passing a law banning head scarves and any other religious garb or insignia from public schools. This is both an attempt to lessen religious tensions and to fortify the government's insistence that France is a purely secular state.

Religion in France, notes tour co-director David Machacek, is seen as a negative influence on public life. The United States, on the other hand, is a secular state but there is a widespread sense that religion is positive, he says. Even strict church-state separationists in America — and he counts himself among them — would not say that religion should be silenced, says Machacek, who teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

In Indonesia religious scholars "are trying to introduce the discourse on pluralism" into the world's most Muslim country, according to Iskandar, vice-director of the Center for Conflict Resolution at the State Institute for Islamic Studies Ar-Raniry. The belief "that Islam is not the only way to go to Heaven" is an increasingly popular view among young, educated people, he says.