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The Political Discourse of Religious Pluralism: World Religions Textbooks, Liberalism, and Civic Identities

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The Political Discourse of Religious Pluralism: World Religions Textbooks, Liberalism, and Civic Identities The Political Discourse of Religious Pluralism: World Religions Textbooks, Liberalism, and Civic Identities by Tiffany Puett A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 2014 © Tiffany Puett 2014 Author’s Declaration: I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Religious pluralism is a meaningful framework for many scholars and students of religion as well as citizens working to make sense of a religiously and culturally diverse society. It purports noble aims: bringing people together across differences and facilitating the inclusion of more people at the proverbial table of democracy. Pluralism has become an essential element in the management of religious diversity in the American public sphere. While presenting itself as politically neutral, the discourse of pluralism is, in fact, embedded with veiled politics. While it embraces a democratizing agenda, it simultaneously engages in regulatory activities that impose limitations and exclusions on people’s beliefs and behaviors. My work investigates this tension. I use Norman Fairclough’s theory of critical discourse analysis to analyze world religions textbooks as discursive sites for the production of the discourse of religious pluralism. I contend that pluralism is a formally non-political discourse that reproduces and legitimates liberal norms and ideology. It functions as a practice of liberal governance—a mode of governmentality. Its discursive practices serve as tools for orchestrating social cohesion and regulating religion within a liberal social framework. By framing this analysis through the concept of governmentality, I aim to explore the enduring salience of liberalism in American society and the multiple discourses that support liberalism’s totalizing tendencies. I investigate the ways in which the rhetoric of liberalism touts individual freedoms as a foundational value, while it simultaneously works in other ways to implicitly manage, regulate, and limit many of those freedoms. As I look at how these world religions textbooks help to mediate and transmit the liberal public sphere, I also consider how these discursive practices reveal the ambivalence and complexity involved in religious diversity in the U.S. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those who contributed to the completion of this project. First, I want to thank David Seljak without whose thoughtful insights, critical eye and diligent feedback this project would have never come to fruition. Thank you very much for all your confidence and encouragement over the years. I have also been fortunate to have the guidance, support and encouragement of Scott Kline and Lorne Dawson and I thank them for that. Thanks to David Streight for his help with connecting to the membership of Religious Studies in Secondary Schools. And thank you to many friends and colleagues over the years for conversations and insights that have helped shape this project, especially Jamie Anne Read, Martie Roberts, and Henry Goldschmidt. I am grateful for my parents, Glenda and Don Puett, for their constant love, support, and help with childcare and my grandparents, Agnes and George O’Gwynn, who have always believed in me and encouraged me to follow this path. And finally, I thank the loves of my life, my husband Jeff, whose partnership, intellect, humor, and enduring love support me in all things, and my children, Lemuel and Lucille, whose beauty and brilliance inspire me every day. iv Table of Contents Author’s Declaration……................................................................................................................ii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................v List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………………...………vii Chapter 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 1.1 World Religions Textbooks and Pluralism…………………………………………...............3 1.2 Thesis Overview…………………………………………………………………………...............5 Chapter 2. Liberalism, Critical Discourse Analysis and Governmentality…………….14 2.1 The Mechanisms of Liberal Discourse………………………….……………………………14 2.1.1 Individualism and autonomy………………………………………………...……..15 2.1.2 Secularism and the liberal public sphere……………………..………………….20 2.1.3 Liberal tolerance…………………………………………..…………………………..23 2.2 Analyzing Liberal Governance: The Concept of Governmentality……………….…….28 2.2.1 Foucault and governmentality……………………………………………………...28 2.2.2 Conducting liberal governance……………………………………………………..32 2.3 The Social Theory of Critical Discourse Analysis…………………………………………36 2.3.1 The dialectics of discourse……………………………………...…………………..36 2.3.2 Discourse and power…………………………………………………………………38 2.3.3 Discourse and ideology………………………………………………………………40 2.3.4 Hegemonic discourses……………………………………………………………….41 2.3.5 Intertextuality and interdiscursivity………………………………………………43 Chapter 3. Situating the Discourse of Religious Pluralism………………………………..47 3.1 Defining Pluralism……………………………………….………………………………………47 3.2 The Social Context of Pluralism…………….…………………………………………………51 3.2.1 Demographic Diversity……………………………………..………………………..51 3.2.2 The First Amendment and the Institutionalization of Liberal Norms……..53 3.2.3 The Protestant Establishment………………………………………………………54 3.2.4 From Tri-Faith to Multiculturalism………………………………………………..55 3.3 Pluralism and the Study of Religion………………………………………………………….56 3.3.1 Pluralism, Protestantism, and theologies of religion………………………….56 3.3.2 The turn to pluralism: American religious history and the sociology of religion………………………………………………………………………………………….58 3.3.3 Two approaches to pluralism………………………………………………………60 3.3.4 Pluralism as the promise of American Liberal Democracy…………………..79 3.4 The Critique of the Discourse of Pluralism…………………………………………………82 3.4.1 Essentializing religion and delineating difference……………………………..83 3.4.2 Negotiating difference through education……………………………………….91 3.4.3 Pluralist values as American values: shaping civic identities………………..97 Chapter 4. The World Religions Textbook: Genre and Discourse……………………...100 4.1 The Textbook as a Genre……………………………………………………………………...100 4.2 The World Religions Paradigm and Its Critics……………………………………………105 4.3 Critical Discourse Analysis: From Theory to Method…………………………………...114 4.4 Compiling a Body of Data…………………………………………………………………….121 Chapter 5. Six World Religions Textbooks…………………………………………………...127 5.1 A Brief Description of Six Textbooks……………………………………………………….127 5.2 Analyzing the Texts: the Construction of Normativity…………………………………136 v 5.2.1 Interdiscursivity………………………………………………………………….…..136 5.2.2 Defining religion………………………………………………………………….….139 5.2.3 Constructing the reader……………………………………………………………154 5.2.4 Delineating difference………………………………………………………….…..161 5.3 Analyzing the Texts: Methods, Rationales, and Strategies for Legitimation…….…164 5.3.1 Methodological positions…………………………………………………………..165 5.3.2 Liberal religion and insider authority…………………………………………...172 5.3.3 Taking religion seriously…………………………………………………………..174 5.3.4 Legitimate religion: separating the good from the bad……………………...176 5.3.5 The September 11 motif……………………………………………………………179 Chapter 6. Textbooks, Liberal Governance, and the Regulation of Religion………..183 6.1 Pluralism, Textured Discourses, and Veiled Politics…………………………………….184 6.1.1 Buddhism: universal, rational, and spiritual…………………………………..186 6.1.2 Islam: particular and political…………………………………………………….199 6.1.3 Pluralism, secularism, and the liberal social order…………………………..215 6.2 The Imagined Citizen…………………………………………………………………………..222 6.2.1 Liberal subjectivities and pluralist morality…………………………………...223 6.2.2 Religion and the American nation……………………………………………….225 6.2.3 Pluralism and civic identities……………………………………………………..230 Chapter 7. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..233 7.1 Directions for Further Research……………………………………………………………..241 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………....244 Appendix A—World Religions Textbook Survey……………………………………………...254 vi List of Tables Table 1: Textbooks chapters, listed by appearance………………………………………….133 Table 2: Comparison of religions covered by each text……………………………………..134 vii Chapter 1: Introduction In the 2000s, I directed educational programs at an interfaith organization in New York City. I remember a conversation with a colleague as we were working together on a grant proposal for a program that would take a religiously and culturally diverse group of high school students to visit a different religious site each month over the course of ten months so that they could learn about these communities and engage in dialogue. My colleague insisted that one of the objectives of the program was to create pluralists, citizens who appreciated the religious and cultural diversity of American society and recognized the importance of engaging religious and cultural differences as part of the task of building a shared democratic society. I was less sure that
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