Theorizing Interreligious Relations

This article is an attempt to think through how interreligious relations might be theorized. It will show how conventional assumptions about interreligious relations can be traced to colonial understandings of the category religion, which determine what we classify as interreligious. I argue that interreligious relations, as we understand it today, developed through the rise of secular nationalism, when religion and politics were purportedly separated as a means of reordering European power structures aligned with Christianity during the formation of the modern nation-state. This rearrangement of power gave rise to Christian ecumenism, which helped pave the way for an evolving secular governance that eventually developed into multicultural pluralist societies in a postcolonial world. This article shall demonstrate how the assumptions that underlie contemporary interreligious relations have little to do with the relationships of people with different religious identities, as one might expect, but instead serve to promote national narratives of pluralism that uphold the liberal ideologies authorizing Western multicultural societies today.