Interreligious Dialogue as a Politics of Recognition: A Postcolonial Rereading of Hegel for Interreligious Solidarity

Abstract

The idea of interreligious dialogue has in the last decade or so been brought under some serious questioning in Christian theology, especially in regard to the efforts made by the proponents of religious pluralism to find on either theoretical or practical grounds a common base and starting point for interreligious dialogue. The postliberal and neotraditionalist critics of pluralism have objected to such an attempt on the basis of the alleged incommensurability and nonconvergence of religions and the need for each religion to confess itself in all its particularity in order to resist the imperial and universalist agenda of secular liberal modernity. Thus, if these opponents of pluralism do not reject the idea of interreligious dialogue altogether, they regard it at best as occasional, ad hoc apologetics or the work of evangelization and witness in another form. In this essay I intend to defend the idea of interreligious dialogue, while moving the discussion forward in light of its critics, by making a case for reconfiguring it as a practice of political theology with the help of the Hegelian notion of “mutual recognition.” I will begin by arguing, against postliberalism and neotraditionalism, for the necessity of reconceiving the idea of interreligious dialogue as a form of “politics of recognition” within today’s postcolonial-neocolonial global context. I will show that the Hegelian notion of mutual recognition, especially when qualified by Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial rereading of it, can be the key for such a reconception insofar as it provides a model of interreligious relationship within a common polity that rejects relations of domination and exclusion while nurturing a sense of solidarity among