What has it meant to refer to the United States as a society built upon “religious pluralism”? How has such “pluralism” been negotiated? Have the changing ways we have defined the term “religious” impacted our conceptions of “religious pluralism”? Can the United States government—which has enshrined both the “free exercise” of religion and the disestablishment of religion in the U.S. Constitution—define “religion” without privileging one “religious” perspective over another? And what might our answers to these questions tell us about how pluralism operates in the United States?
These questions will guide our exploration of the concept of “religious pluralism” as it has played out in the United States. This course will examine various ways in which “religious pluralism” has been imagined, tested, and implemented with an eye toward mapping shifting power relations in American society while at the same time considering different articulations of pluralism as competing expressions of American identity.