In his 1978 book The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger made a startling proposal: in light of the increasing level of religious pluralism in Western societies (including popular interest in Asian religions and the resurgence of Islam), Berger argued that the time had arrived for a new kind of religious conversation to begin to take place--one that would move beyond disinterested scholarship or even "the sort of dialogue that could be described as reciprocal antidefamation...Both of these two kinds of attention are certainly valid, even praiseworthy, but they are not contestation" in the sense he intended (Berger, THI, 151-152). Nor did he intend the "missionizing" of the adherents of one sect by another--a mode that he felt was "happily on the wane" in the late 1970's. Instead, for Berger, "Contestation means an open-ended encounter with other religious possibilities on the level of their truth claims. Put differently, one seriously engages another religion if one is open, at least hypothetically, to the proposition that this other religion is true. Put differently again, to enter into interreligious contestation is to be prepared to change one's own view of reality. Anything short of this, however valuable it may be (for scholarship, say, or for joint sociopolitical concerns, or just for an enlargement of cultural horizons), is less than the contestation called for by the present situation. It is this kind of contestation that is as yet in an embryonic phase" (152).
Notice that Berger did not stipulate that those who would engage in this type of conversation would do so prepared to change their religious affiliations or practices--although, I think it reasonable to assume that he would allow for such a possibility. But any such change would be wholly within a given individual's discretion, and would not be the objective of those who participate in the conversation. One can even imagine a scenario where one party, convinced of the "truth" of another party's religious tradition, would announce her decision to leave her own tradition for the other's--only to find herself in the odd position of having the other party attempt to dissuade her from making any such change! Most peculiar, but not out of the realm of possibility.
What Berger appears to have imagined the new religious pluralism in Western societies portended was a new relationship of religious individuals towards truth claims--that, mirabile dictu, religious individuals in the West had reached a new stage of intellectual maturity: one in which they would be willing to entertain the possibility that they embrace religious dogmas uncritically and, therefore, another religious tradition might prove to be more credible with respect to particular truth claims.
It is an interesting idea and one that merits further consideration; but it is also one that ignores the fact that, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine that, three and a half decades on, this kind of "contestation" is anywhere near the "embryonic" phase that Berger believed it to have been in the 1970's--much less a fully developed being waiting to be born.
I will explore these propositions further in future posts.
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