Religious Pluralism Depends on Institutions That Sustain Disagreement

John Inazu described pluralism as the alternative to trying to win public life at all costs or withdrawing from it. Winning can work, he said, but only while your side stays in power. The last 12 to 14 years of national politics offer little reason to expect that any one team will. Retreating to separate corners avoids some conflict but does not sustain a shared political life. Pluralism offers neither victory nor a final settlement. It protects the procedures and processes through which people can keep arguing.

That modest aim shaped how the panel discussed religious liberty. Its members did not present pluralism as a promise that people will agree about religion, or that public life will be free of religious claims. They argued instead for maintaining room for people and institutions with different commitments to participate, disagree and cooperate.

Wendy Cadge connected that responsibility to the places where people meet. As a college president, she said, part of her role is to make sure the institution provides space for debate and works to support it rather than enabling one side to shut the other down. She does not expect the underlying disagreement to be solved. The task is to sustain the hope and institutional commitment needed to continue debating it.

Eboo Patel argued that the stories Americans tell about their shared life can either support or undermine that work. He proposed beginning the contemporary American story with a public house in Philadelphia in the 1760s or 1770s. In his account, people of Western European and West African backgrounds, including both free and enslaved people, and members of several Native American tribes were part of the same urban world. Their relations involved coexistence and cooperation, but also tension. Patel cited a description from Ken Burns’s film of the eastern seaboard that would become the United States as perhaps the most diverse place on the planet in the mid-to-late eighteenth century.

Patel emphasized that this history contains both grave wrongdoing and a tradition of religious liberty. The removal of Native peoples and enslavement were, he said, sinful; he rejected softer descriptions. He also described the founders as making a different set of decisions about religious diversity: that different faiths would be free, that the country would attempt equality, and that cooperation would be encouraged. His question was whether cooperation across religious difference could help address institutionalized inequality. He presented that possibility as a shared American moral inheritance drawn from particular moral traditions, not as a single imposed code of belief.

Inazu made a separate point about Patel’s setting. He suggested that it was probably a pub or public house, and said the history mattered partly because such publicly available spaces existed. Privately owned, they could still bring people together in person to discuss ideas, dissent and organize. He worried that some publicly available spaces are becoming more constrained or privately controlled in ways that diminish discourse.

The two speakers drew different lessons from the scene: Patel used it to describe a diverse society and choices made in response to it; Inazu emphasized the spaces in which people could meet. Their discussion framed religious liberty not only as permission to hold a belief, but, in their account, as also involving the settings in which people can gather and speak with those whose beliefs differ from their own.

Cadge extended the question to contemporary life: where do people still meet across social and educational differences, and what responsibility do they have to go there? She referred to David Brooks’s observation that he visits dive bars when he travels, and pointed to demographic changes that can make it easier for people to remain among those like themselves. Pluralism, she suggested, requires both places where conversation can happen and people willing to enter them.

Higher education became a test case for the panel’s arguments about pluralism. Colleges bring people with different commitments together, but the panelists disagreed about how well institutions are doing that work and what reform should look like.

Patel began by insisting that American colleges and universities are among the country’s greatest achievements and deserve investment and renewal. He invoked Andy Delbanco’s view that they belong among the top five achievements of American civilization, alongside jazz, the Constitution and baseball. His criticism of the dominant diversity approach was not an argument against higher education. It was a challenge to whether colleges had taught students to understand religious traditions in their own terms or to relate across difference.

He described giving a talk about the Islamic tradition’s emphasis on learning, hospitality and cooperation. Afterward, a professor told him that her introductory cultural-diversity course devoted all three class sessions on Islam to Islamophobia. She wanted Muslim students to know that America hates them. Patel objected not to teaching about Islamophobia, which he said exists, but to making it more important than Islam itself. He also described his children returning from diversity workshops where facilitators repeatedly asked how they had been victimized by Islamophobia, but never how they were inspired by Islam.

For Patel, pluralism begins with particular identities: it asks how people who disagree about important things relate when they live in close quarters. Identity can be a source of pride, not just a marker of injury. If a person chooses to narrate their experience through victimization, he said, that should be their choice rather than an assumption imposed from the start. His argument was not to ignore prejudice, but to resist reducing a religious identity to the prejudice directed against it.

Patel connected the problem to the intellectual habits he thought universities should cultivate. He cited economist Roland Fryer’s account of being treated as an economist among other economists at the University of Chicago, where rigorous criticism of his work helped him improve. A faculty adviser at Harvard, Fryer recalled, warned him to watch out for liberals—not because of their political beliefs, Patel explained, but because they might see his race as a reason not to challenge his work rigorously. Patel asked whether diversity, equity and inclusion had become a safe script for progressive people in liberal institutions, and what the cost might be to students’ excellence.

His criticism was specific: he said sociology should not be 40 or 50 to 1 liberal to conservative, and universities should not have established bias response teams or published lists of words that speakers might get in trouble for saying. He argued that institutions should acknowledge what they got wrong, then ask what it means to do a discipline well and how a wider range of perspectives can be part of that work. He compared the approach to a football coach who tells the truth about what went wrong after a loss and then prepares the team to win the next game.

John Inazu agreed that coercion does not change hearts and minds, but was more pessimistic about higher education’s ability to use what he called a rare opportunity for change. Some colleges, he said, have coherent missions; many, particularly elite institutions, seem to define success as excellence, a larger endowment or outranking nearby schools. Those are not, in his view, meaningful missions. Without one, institutions shift with political pressures and competing demands—from DEI under one administration to institutional neutrality under another, and then to ideological diversity.

He warned that some institutions may embrace pluralism as a political instrument rather than a shared project. Inazu called those actors “pluralism pretenders”: people who use the language of cooperation to weaken an opposing side. He pointed to efforts to recruit conservative faculty. When universities bring people in from outside without finding existing faculty who support the effort and want to work with them, he argued, they risk staging another culture-war confrontation. Building a community requires identifying partners within the institution, not telling existing faculty simply to deal with new arrivals.

Cadge offered a view from inside a college classroom. She described teaching first-year students at Bryn Mawr to ask questions about what is sacred and what they themselves believe. In one exchange, she paused students to notice that they had challenged one another’s ideas without making the disagreement personal. Asking the right question, she said, can matter more than a student’s answer. This kind of learning happens in college classrooms even if it does not always appear in newspaper accounts. Her aim, she said, is not to defend every institution but to complicate the story about higher education and ask what a liberal education can offer.

Inazu saw both accounts as true. Many faculty and students are doing the ordinary work of learning together; at the same time, some campus behavior deserves scrutiny. Public narratives can turn that into a binary: higher education is either captured by progressives or a target for political intervention. Inazu argued that reform should start by finding the people already committed to improving an institution, rather than treating the whole institution as an enemy. He described the opportunity for change as possibly once in a lifetime, but worried that colleges were squandering it and that little meaningful change would remain after five or ten years.

Mission was one point of difference between the speakers’ accounts. Cadge said colleges and universities should begin with their mission statements, which she called their “sacred text,” and ask who is there and why. Inazu said Cadge’s account demonstrated what a coherent mission could look like, while acknowledging he could not tell a similar story about his own institution. At his university, he said, the liberal arts would not even make the first line of the mission statement.

Access to institutions was another concern. An audience member described searching for law-school scholarships and finding some that were openly hostile to religion, and others that required applicants to frame themselves through victimization, but none supporting pluralism or religious liberty. Inazu answered that institutional pluralism matters: there should be many kinds of law schools with different missions, including schools where students pursuing religious liberty will be supported. If people stop defending the significance of institutions with different missions, he warned, those opportunities can disappear.

Cadge described Bryn Mawr’s efforts to make its own institution more accessible. Students from families earning less than $150,000 attend tuition-free, she said, and nearly 85 percent of students receive some form of financial aid. The college also partnered with community colleges and ran a summer program for students considering a four-year degree who had never been on a campus. Participants received a stipend to explore that possibility. For Cadge, access is one way an institution puts its mission into practice. She also cautioned against treating higher education as the only place where pluralism can be built.

The campus debate raised a further question: what should students learn about identity and disagreement? Patel said pluralism requires both knowledge and a skill set. People need to know something about the traditions and communities around them, and they need practice cooperating with people who hold deep disagreements.

He described pluralism as having more than one dimension. The political dimension, which he associated with James Madison, asks how groups or factions can be encouraged to cooperate even when they disagree. The cultural dimension, associated with Horace Kallen and Alain Locke, takes seriously the value of America’s “manyness.” Patel linked their thinking to William James’s view that the world is many, not one. Rather than a melting pot in which distinctions disappear, he offered the potluck as a metaphor: people bring dishes shaped by their identities, and the table can make possible combinations and conversations that would not exist if everyone brought the same thing.

Patel cited Black music and Jewish delis as examples of cultural expression shaped by identity, and pointed to faith-founded civic organizations. The Salvation Army and Catholic Charities, he said, are the two largest social-service providers in the country after the federal government. He also named organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and the YMCA. His point was that identity and religious traditions can contribute to civic institutions that serve a wider community.

Patel argued that diversity work often failed to teach either the intellectual history of pluralism or the practical work of making cooperation possible. He named the Flushing Remonstrance, Madison, William James, Kallen, Locke, Jane Addams, John Dewey and John Rawls as part of the intellectual tradition. The difficult work of getting people with serious disagreements to cooperate, he said, is a skill set—“like being an NFL quarterback.” He called higher education the institution best positioned to teach it.

An audience member raised a tension within pluralism: if it begins with particularity, should people nevertheless avoid leading every conversation with an identity? He described a French rabbi’s positive account of laïcité, in which a citizen does not begin by saying “as a woman” or “as a Jew,” even though those identities remain part of who she is. Could colleges teach students not to lead with identity, so they are not locked into a predetermined way of thinking?

Cadge answered that differences need context. People could be divided by whether their earlobes are attached, she observed, but in that room it would probably not be an important or powerful distinction. Education should help students understand not only that differences exist, but which differences matter in a particular setting.

Patel said he would not criticize laïcité, but explained why he preferred pluralism. Identity, in his account, is valuable not only to people’s lives but also to democracy and civic life. The potluck metaphor asks people to bring a dish shaped by who they are, while the shared table makes exchange among those differences possible. This does not mean that every person must foreground every part of their identity in every conversation. It does mean that institutions should not assume identity is best understood as a source of injury, or that cooperation requires people to leave their traditions at the door.

Patel also described a limit to what cooperation demands. He said he would not buy a cookie at a Nazi bake sale, however good the cookies. Many disagreements in American life, he argued, are reasonable disagreements that people need to be able to bracket in order to work on shared concerns. The practice is not to pretend differences have disappeared, or to treat every position as equally acceptable. It is to distinguish disagreements people can set aside for a common task from boundaries they will not cross.

An audience member asked how to reach people who claim to defend religious liberty while arguing that Muslims are trying to conquer the country and should be expelled. She cited anti-Sharia activism in Texas and noted that simply calling out Islamophobia may not change the minds of people who accept those claims.

John Inazu focused on the channels through which the claims circulate. He said anti-Sharia narratives are transmitted heavily through Christian radio, a network he described as extensively funded and well connected. People seeking to counter the messages may be looking to national opinion pieces and television instead of engaging with the channels that carry them. Inazu contrasted the prominence of the issue in that media environment with his own assessment that the danger of Sharia law in Nebraska would not rank among his top thousand religious-liberty concerns. He said people need to understand who is shaping these narratives and how they reach audiences before they can challenge them, adding that he did not think enough people were working on that problem.

An audience member described a building shared by a mosque, a synagogue and a church. Each congregation holds services in the same room at different times. The arrangement takes work, he said, but it has created an interest in the success of all three communities. He asked how that kind of interdependence could be built more broadly.

Eboo Patel began with the building’s practical needs. If it floods or the heating fails, everyone has a problem. Working together to fix it can create relationships that extend beyond the immediate task. If the congregations share a building, he suggested, they might also share a children’s space supervised by people from different faiths. The cooperation begins with a concrete need; new connections can grow from it.

Patel defined the civic as the space where people with diverse identities and divergent ideologies come together to do concrete things cooperatively and build community. Little League was one example. Adults who may disagree about abortion or the Middle East are not introduced on the field as “the pro-choice guy” or “the pro-life guy”; they are first-base and third-base coaches. Over a season, shared work can generate relationships strong enough that one family helps another when a child is in trouble.

Inazu connected that practice to the health of local institutions. People working together locally, he said, are reminded of real people and real problems, unlike the disembodied figures and punch lines of social media. But such work requires organizations that are healthy, well governed and well funded. He worried that funders may prefer large events and visible performances to small, sustained relational efforts. The latter can take decades, he said, and do not fit easily into glossy reports.

Patel suggested that interfaith partnerships may increasingly involve shared buildings, partly because congregations may have money for only one piece of real estate. The arrangement can create practical reasons for groups to look after one another, but its success depends on making the shared space work.

An audience member asked whether a pluralistic society has enough “glue” to hold together as its culture unravels. The question pointed to the historical influence of Anglo-Saxon institutions and a strong Christian narrative in American life, including the Great Awakenings and the role of evangelicals in anti-slavery efforts. If those traditions no longer provide a common story, the questioner asked, what can?

John Inazu called this a central question of the moment. People can reject an older narrative for good reasons, including its exclusion of many voices and abuses of power, but still have to ask what replaces it. He referred to Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age as a diagnosis of the collapse of the white Protestant mainline in middle-class America and some of the institutional challenges that follow. Inazu asked what could fill the space left by that decline, and said that the coalition for diversity was not building hospitals or universities or providing large-scale social services.

For the places where a shared story might be built, Inazu pointed back to local life: institutions where people face real needs together, rather than encountering one another as disembodied figures online. He argued that this work depends on local organizations that are healthy, well governed and adequately funded. Sustaining small, relational efforts over time, he said, is a long project—perhaps 20 years—and does not necessarily produce glossy reports or large events.

Patel agreed that a cohesive culture can bring real benefits. He pointed to small social conventions, such as apologizing when a tennis ball clips the net and still goes over, or not gloating after hitting a home run. He described these as examples of a shared culture rather than fixed rules. He also acknowledged that his own family benefited from church-oriented cultures: his father went to Notre Dame, and Patel said that was part of why he was in the United States.

But Patel questioned whether commonality can continue to depend on one religious or ethnic tradition. Drawing on Michael Walzer’s What It Means to Be an American, he contrasted the United States with countries whose national identities are associated with a particular ethnicity, language and relatively cohesive culture. The American story, he argued, can instead be about what people make of their “manyness.” In his account, there was no single ethnic group called Americans who prayed in the same way and then built the country. There was a disparate population brought together by “remarkable and flawed leaders.”

Patel cited George Washington’s insistence that Catholics serve in the Continental Army and that anyone speaking against the Pope would be court-martialed. He described that as an example of building a diverse institution that could help build a diverse nation. His proposed common story begins not by erasing particular identities, but by asking what can be built from them. He pointed to the idea of America as a patchwork of religious communities and nonbelievers, drawing on language from Ronald Reagan’s farewell address and Barack Obama’s inaugural address. In Patel’s account, this story requires welcoming contributions from different communities and knowing something about them.

Wendy Cadge challenged any account of shared history that did not first address power. A story of diverse people cooperating can conceal who had power and who was excluded. An account of the country’s beginnings has to ask who was not in the room, including women and people without access to public life. She described Bryn Mawr’s effort to acknowledge the contributions of Black maids and porters, whose labor had been largely overlooked in the college’s history. After the college invited artists to address that history, Nekisha Durrett created Don’t Forget to Remember Me, a monument incorporating names found on surviving time cards and blocks of light representing people whose names had been lost. Cadge said the college could not tell a coherent story about itself until it recognized whose voices had been heard and whose had not.

Patel agreed that this history belongs in a common story. Coherence, he said, does not mean a narrative without discord; it means making room for multiple interpretations, including accounts that expose the gap between a country’s principles and actions. He invoked Frederick Douglass’s condemnation of American Christianity as a sham alongside Douglass’s refusal to despair of the nation. He also cited Danielle Allen’s account of why she loves the Constitution as a Black woman whose ancestors were enslaved. Patel said he was interested in holding these accounts together rather than choosing either an uncritical celebration or a story that leaves out the country’s principles and institutions.