“A comparative theology that works against reifying power of identity configurations, sanctified in the name of religion, is a powerful and desperately needed counterforce to those agnostic energies that are currently fracturing any hope for planetary loves” — Dr. Thatamanil
INTRODUCTION
On December 5th, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments for the case 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis. The case follows a Colorado graphic designer named Lorie Smith, who in 2021 sued the state of Colorado for a Colorado anti-discrimination law (CADA) that makes it unlawful for Smith and her graphic design company 303 Creative to preemptively publish, display, or mail any communication that declares that she will not create websites celebrating same-sex marriages. Smith sued the Colorado Civil Rights Division on grounds that CADA inhibited her first amendment rights. For Smith, her discrimination is a product of her religious beliefs. She believes that her God is calling her to promote and celebrate His heteronormative design for marriage by creating custom wedding websites for weddings between straight couples only and that by virtue of her “discharging her religious duty,” Smith desires to communicate her exclusionary religious beliefs, namely her antagonism towards queer marriage, on her website to prospective clients.
At stake with this decision are Jim Crow-style exclusionary publications that have eerie resonances with “No Negroes Allowed” signs. 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis quickly rose to prominence in political discourse because at the heart of this case are questions about discrimination, free speech, and an age-old debate: the right relationship between “law” and “religion.” It is questions like these that energize my entire vocational aspirations and the liberation theologies that are the foundation for my worldview.
This case follows a long tradition of jurisprudence regarding religious freedom. The category of “religion” has posed a philosophical challenge to American polity since our union’s inception despite religious freedom being one of its core principles. This challenge is apparent in how literally the first sentence of the American Bill of Rights is that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In this paper I will explore the landscape of religious diversity in the United States and my own relationship with interreligious engagement through a series of short essays. Overall, I will show how the legal system can learn something ethically formative from the praxis of interreligious engagement and how this knowledge may sit at the fulcrum of our future of contending with difference in America.
RELIGIOUS DIVERISTY: Ethically Engaging with Others
The category of “religion” is a contested category. However, one conception, put forth by comparative theologian Dr. John Thatamanil , is to view religion as systems that offer salvific knowledge of some extra-mundane ultimate transcendent reality. From this, Dr. Thatamanil explains that to be religious, in his eyes, is to aspire to a comprehensive orientation that aligns with one’s knowledge of the ultimate. With this understanding alone, one can see how religious diversity offers a particular societal challenge. On one hand, there is a barrier in domain. Religion, in comparison to other categories of difference, specifically deals with cosmic, metaphysical notions of transcendence, salvation, and the ultimate. This can seldom be seen with the naked eyed much less quantified or scientifically expressed. Thus, religious expression is inherently normative. On the other hand, there is a barrier of human difference. Religions diversity speaks to the very heart of how a society manages variations in socialization, opposing views, and the multitude of disparities that can arise from people’s orientations of the ultimate. Yet within this complexity, for the future of American jurisprudence and social cohesion, it is imperative that we carefully consider a perspective on religious diversity that creates “a bridge to understanding difference.” It requires an approach to religious diversity that brings our society closer to true religious freedom. True religious freedom occurs in the absence of violence and bigotry. Therefore, the central question of religious diversity is exactly the same one implicit in the questions presented before the Supreme Court today, “how must we engage ethically with ideological differences?”
As stated by Dr. Khyati Y. Joshi, although the United States has a constitutionally guaranteed “freedom of religion” having free choice is not the same having one’s choice accepted and supported by institutional power and the culture of one’s country rather than ignored, marginalized, and even demonized. Plus going further, I advance that freedom is hardly fee if it results in violence and bigotry.
On this front, one cannot overstate the level of violence that has occurred in the West, and especially in the United States, by virtue of the American history of detrimental treatments of religious difference and historical exclusivism – an exclusivism that is characteristic of the rampant fundamentalism and evangelicalism that dominates American political life. These groups often adhere to what liberalist American theologian, Dr. Paul Knitter, calls the “replacement model.” This model proposes that the best way to relate to people of other religious paths is to share a version of the “good news” of Jesus with the religious other in hopes that this will bring them into the community of Jesus-followers. It is a model that undergirds the logical of Lorie Smith’s “religious duty” to discriminate.
A grim consequence of such ideologies are five categories of religious oppression that are salient in American society that were outlined by Warren Blumenfeld in his analysis of American Christian privilege. These categories include powerlessness, exploitation, marginalization, cultural Imperialism, and violence. Joshi and Blumenfeld further outline the historic and systemic pattern of domination and subordination of religious minorities on all levels of American political life from religious justification for exploitation during American colonialism and slavery in the 19th century; to marginalization of Muslims, Indigenous peoples, and New Religious Movements in schools and legislation in the 20th century; to inescapable Christian cultural imperialism in the everyday life of the 21st century. This is hardly religious freedom.
Taking this problematic history into consideration, I believe that it is necessary to approach topics at the intersection of law and religion with a heuristic posture of open inclusivism to contend with religious differences in the face of the law. Overall, this calls for jurisprudence to learn from contemporary Theologies of Religious Diversity (TDR) to truly advance religious freedom and provide a more perfect, interreligious union. It calls for jurisprudence to prioritize accepting and supporting difference, instead of ignoring, marginalizing, and at its worse demonizing.
Open inclusivism is a TDR where adherents believe that some of the notions of an unfamiliar religion’s salvific, transcendent knowledge not (or not yet) explicitly taught by the adherent’s practiced religion, can be known to, and taught by the unfamiliar religion. For example, a Christian open inclusivist (like myself) believes that there are relevant, divine truths inherent in Buddhism that contributes to someone’s salvation. That God and God’s salvation cannot be limited to one religious’ tradition over another. It includes what Paul Knitter calls, the acceptance model, which seeks to recognize and live with the complexity, even the impossibility, of accepting the reality that we are living in our own cultural worlds, that the world we live in affects how we look at everything else, and that many cultural-religious worlds that make up humanity are very different. That there are many truths for many salvations.
Especially as a Christian in conversation with the Christian nation of America, I believe this is sanctioned by Christian theology itself. It is imbedded in the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels, the speaking to people in their own language during Pentecost of Acts 2, the feeding and being fed by the religious other, all being one letter of to the Galatians. It is love. However, I do believe that there is a nonnegotiable limit to open inclusivism —the opposite to this version of “empire-style love”— violence. I construe violence similarly to Blumenfeld. Violence occurs when one is in a state of constant fear of physical, emotional, or cultural pain. Thus, xenophobia is thus a of violence. Therefore, if one’s religious beliefs include sanction xenophobia, profiling, and bigotry it is not included in my proposed form of open inclusivism.
What jurisprudence, who exists in a world of A versus B, opinion v. dissent, can learn from open inclusivism is a heuristic of truth on both sides. It can learn to assess cases with similar criterion that Dr. Thatamanil uses. Does it affirm that traditions are different enough that we have something new to learn from them, but not so different that it is incommensurable? Does it affirm that at least some of the claims made by traditions must be true? Does it offer an account of “religion” and “the religions” that does not make interreligious learning impossible? Does it Takes seriously the intimate connection between specific claims, practices, and aims of that tradition?
INTERRELIGIOUS ENGAGMENT: Legal Interreligious Activism
Along with a posture of open inclusivism there are also other approaches to interreligious engagement that can shed light on equitable jurisprudence of religious freedom. These approaches include, multiple religious participation, chaplaincy, comparative theology, interfaith learning—and most pertinent to jurisprudence—scriptural reasoning, interreligious dialogue, and interiting.
Multiple Religious Participation (MRP), an approach associated with Multiple Religious Belonging, occurs when a person engages with ideas and practices drawn from traditions outside of their own. As written by comparative theologian John Bethrong, MRP is the conscious (and sometimes unconscious) use of religious ideas, practices, symbols, meditations, prayers, chants, and sensibilities derived from one tradition by a member of another community of faith for their own purposes. One can view MRP as the practical application of comparative theology.
One definition of comparative theology that I particularly resonate is Francis X Clooney’s description of comparative theology inspired from St. Anslem’s fides quaerens intellectum. For Clooney, Comparative theology occurs when acts of “faith seeking understanding” that are rooted in a particular faith tradition (and from that foundation) venture into learning from one or more “other” faith traditions. It is a curiosity that seeks to learn for the sake of fresh theological insights for the mutual benefit of the newly encountered tradition/s as well as the home tradition. Put in conversation with Dr. Thatamanil, it is constructive reflection that insists on learning from and with “other religions. Comparative theology regularly informs the vocation of chaplaincy and interfaith learning spaces.
Chaplains are institutional stewards who help people remember who they are when they are not in crisis and therefore are interested in helping people engage with their spirituality. This requires learning from a variety of religious traditions. Interreligious engagement also manifests in approaches to interfaith learning and the development of interreligious/intercultural classrooms, or spaces where people in community are intentionally learning and negotiating the complexities of interreligious life, as well as the larger systemic and societal structures of public and religious life. According to Hannah J. Visser et al., interfaith learning follows a matrix where religious knowledge, skills, and attitudes are developed across the self and others interacting personally and societally by virtue of the interfaith space. The matrix further outlines the clear benefits of interfaith learning in communities.

Figure 1: Matrix of Interfaith Learning
In terms of jurisprudence, I believe more research should be done in how the legal system can learn from approaches of scriptural reasoning, interreligious dialogue, and interiting, for the system to reap the same benefits of interfaith spaces. Scriptural reasoning is the study and discussion of religious texts by people of different respective religious traditions. Originating from the Jewish textual reasoning practices, scriptural reasoning offers a model for privileging understanding above agreement, enables the pursuit of collegiality without requiring consensus, and embodies the right relations between world-disclosure and problem solving. Scriptural reasoning is done well when practioners don’t seek consensus but understanding and friendship. Scriptural Reasoning pairs with Interreligious Dialogue which simply refers to the actual conversations (either formal, academic or interpersonal) among people of different religious traditions who are willing to listen to one another and share their stories of faith and values. Interreligious dialogue can also exist in forms of prayer (religious experience), study (theological exchange), and action (working together for peace). For the legal system, what would this mean for is learning from the primary sources of and actually being in dialogue with other legal systems around the world that don’t pretend to be secular. For example, this could mean learning about the restorative justice practices of Islamic fatwa courts to revolutionize tort law. Or possibly engaging with Navajo Peacemaking courts, and how their indigenous religious practices offer a model of distributive justice that completely problematized how Americans view punishment. What would it mean, for example, to integrate notions of Navajo distributive justice in the criminal legal system? Further research would as consider “nonsecular” legal systems as viable arenas for both interfaith AND inter-legal learning.
In terms of implementation, Interiting proposes a model for the systemic integration of practices from scriptural reasoning and interreligious (inter-legal) dialogue. Interiting is a form of gaining tacit knowledge that can exist in two forms. Outer-facing interiting occurs when believers belonging to various faith traditions come together for prayer, celebration, or worship in response to some external event or challenge. Inner-facing interrituailty occurs when believers extend hospitality to strangers by inviting them to visit, celebrate, or even participate in the ritual life of one’s community symbolizing a desire to transcend confessional barriers.
Using interreligious dialogue as an American legal approach is not new, yet there is hardly consensus on how it should be applied. Currently there is a wide contingency of scholarship that explicitly names interreligious dialogue as a useful tool for reconciling difference but still has not penetrated to the level of jurisprudence. A leader at this intersection is Spanish legal scholar Javier Martinez-Torron who believes that although the state should facilitate spaces of interreligious dialogue, it should not utilize it as a tool for doctrinal reasoning. Conversely, there are many in the field of human rights that believe that it is a useful tool to retrieve common values and address systemic issues of discrimination. All in all, more work needs to be done on not just the use of modes of interreligious engagement in the legal system but specifically how it can provide theoretical support for jurisprudence, like other disciplines such as economics, data science, race studies, etc.
All in all, adopting approaches to interreligious engagement in the legal system may have the potential of revolutionizing it. For cases like 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis, an interreligious take would seek to learn from how other legal systems deal with difference under their religious modalities of justice, but also it would mean crafting jurisprudence that ensures that one can practice their religious beliefs in harmony and friendships of others devoid of marginalization. Religious freedom is only valid when there is harmony. Jurisprudence should be a space of interfaith learning and vice versa because it has the direct benefit for advancing empathy, appreciation towards other worldviews, and so awareness of injustice.
EMBODIED LEARNING: “Hey Dad, Guess What…”
My optimism for the legal field’s capacity to change based on interreligious engagement came from the embodied learning I was able to receive from the site visits and practices of IE102. Each of my site visits were commemorated with a single phone call. I would leave the church/temple/synagogue/mosque, head to my bedroom, dial a number I’ve memorized since childhood and start with a single phrase: “Hey Dad, Guess What?”
“Guess what…I went to a mosque for the first time.” As a Nigerian American, I have many family members who are Muslim, and as a scholar of human rights, I am deeply interested in remedying the harms of Islamophobia/the war on terror. All in all, Islam was not completely foreign to me and yet it took me 22 years to attend my first Jum’ah service. For the first time I realized that my respect for Islam was always juxtaposed to my Christianity, and I never took time to engage with Islam on its own terms. As I spoke to my dad about the experience, I felt embarrassed about my ignorance but was pleasantly surprised to learn that in my quest for knowledge I was able to connect with my dad in a way I hadn’t before. In our conversation he told me stories about his childhood that would have gone to his grave if not for this phone call. That Friday I got a crash course on my Christian privilege, but also was able to connect with a part of my ancestry that I took for granted.
“Guess what…I participated in a Hindu ritual.” In that call, I explained to my dad how, of all the site visits I attended, this visit was the most unusual for me. I did not mean “unusual” in a pejorative way, but unusual in how the experience was completely foreign to my comfort zone, physically and theologically. The best word to describe my experience at the Hindu temple is “sensory.” All my senses were engaged. From the moment I crossed the threshold of the golden doors of the temple, my body was enveloped in the fragrance of incense, the sounds of melodic prayers, and the taste of fear that ticked my stomach. It was from this experience that for the first time I was able to teach my dad something he’d never heard of before: “arti.” I explained to him the meaning of Hare Krishna, and the candle lighting ritual as part of our worship service. Both literally and emotionally, I was able to speak to my dad in a new language and describe a physicality that my body is delighted to remember.
“Guess what…you would not believe how familiar my experience at the Buddhist church was.” My visit to the Buddhist Church gave me a new understanding on the concept of “familiarity.” I did not enter the service with many expectations, and yet I was still amazed by how similar the service felt to my own tradition. In our phone call, I explained how I was able to bring the message of the Christian sermon that I attended immediately before into conversation with the Buddhist one. The reverend at Buddhist church taught about Kakushinni, the daughter of Shinran Shonin. She explained how Kakushinni subverted the tradition that she was intimately familiar with because of her father to make an incredible impact on the sustainability of Shin Buddhism. For my father, I was able to use this to show how community cohesion can be a product of (not merely despite) subversion. Both of our experiences of Christianity, or rather the Christian church, have been associated with isolation and shame. Yet for the first time, I, and now my father vicariously through me, were able to physically embody was it meant to do church in a way completely foreign to everything that we knew, and yet still feel familiar.
My father was the last person in my family to understand my decision to go to seminary before law school. Since I applied to seminary and law school at the same time, he would conveniently “forget” about my decision to defer law school after I got my acceptance. In fact, before these phone calls, when I would call my dad, he would ask me questions about how my law lectures were going, even weeks after starting classes at Union. I believe part of his “forgetfulness” was a product of his devaluation of religion. Although my dad is mythologized to be the first person to convert to Christianity in his family, my dad is effectively a “non.”—a person who is spiritual but non-religious—and viewed religion as both unnecessary and harmful. He conversely could not understand why I would elect to go to seminary without wanting to be a nun or a pastor, and thus instead of contending with the “gray area” of wanting to seek religious education outside of formal religious, he discounted it altogether. Yet now, my dad’s posture toward my seminary education has completely changed. He explicitly admitted that it was because of my new experiences with other religions that he was able to understand.
Overall, if me and my father’s relationship can develop by virtue of embodied learning on a microlevel, I am keenly optimistic in the ability for it to be done on a macroscale. I sincerely cannot wait for the day when I call my dad and reminisce about how I am still benefitting from all the amazing insights I learned stemming from my site visits and embodied practices in IE102.
INTERRELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT AND VOCATION: The Praxis of Legal Theology
In 2024 (Inshallah), I will be starting my 1L year at Columbia Law School a few months after graduating with my MAR from Union Theological Seminary. I hope to build a career in public interest law and one day preside over cases regarding the “[non]establishment of religion and the free exercise thereof.” The first amendment will be my niche and be foundational to my work as both a lawyer and legal theologian. Therefore, if I were the judge presiding over a case like 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis, I would draw on my experiences starting with IE102 and consider my opinion in the following ways:
First, I would privilege learning. For me, the universal value that is at the heart of concepts like interfaith education, interreligious dialogue, scriptural reasoning, comparative theology, interiting etc., is one thing: curiosity of the Other. In this case, I would craft my legal opinions in a way that does not limit the capacity for one to engage with others but support it. Part of the risk that 303 Creative poses a constitutional sanction for limiting interaction with others simply because their personal choices do not mesh with what you may believe in. To enable this would be a threat to free exercise and a challenge to “securing the blessings of liberty.” It is interreligious engagement that teaches us theoretically and practically how one can go about doing this and creating spaces of religious flourishing —nonviolent, inclusive, harmonious flourishing.
I would be remiss to characterize Interreligious Engagement in such lofty terms without acknowledging that in the grand scheme of the history of religion, there has objectively been more harm done on the basis on interreligious “engagement” then mutual benefit. From this, my second consideration would simply be to do things differently on behalf of interreligious engagement. So often, religious engagement in America has sounded like Lorie Smith. With my power as a public servant, I aim to work with and learn from people who I may not understand in way that have not be done before. I want to further conceptualize working theories for how the government can scale the matrix of interfaith learning. Since antiquity, salvific knowledge of some extra-mundane ultimate transcendent reality that we call “religion” has always been at the core of transforming status quo. Jurisprudence can thus be an interreligious act once it seeks right orientation of justice in conversation with the Other.
And lastly, I would test my opinion based on four familiar criteria. I would ask myself, (1) does my opinion in this case affirm that people can be different enough that we have something new to learn from them, but not so different that it is incommensurable? (2) Does my opinion affirm that at least some of the claims made by ideologies at hand must be true, on both sides and devoid of violence? (3) Does my opinion offer an account of “religion” and “the religions” that does not make interreligious learning impossible? And (4) Does my opinion take seriously the intimate connection between specific claims, practices, and aims of otherized tradition at hand? From this perspective alone, I believe that this can inform jurisprudence into greater horizons.
All in all, I want to be an architect of equitable, inclusive interreligious freedom in my community on a—wherever I end up finding it—on a greater mission of advancing human rights. I sincerely believe that the best way to do this is by looking to interreligious engagement for guidance.
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