Clarifying the Psychological Underpinnings of Covenantal Pluralism: Relational Engagement Across Religious Differences

The philosophical framework of covenantal pluralism offers a vision for navigating religious and worldview differences through active relational engagement beyond tolerance. This non-relativistic approach envisions both legal equality and a relational culture in which people of deeply different commitments engage one another with mutual respect and protection. Building on this framework, we propose psychologically-relevant components underlying relational engagement in covenantal pluralism, including its constituent psychological processes (a person's beliefs, emotions, behaviors, and motivations), its person-level enablers (virtues and traits), and its contextual enablers (the structural climate, leadership and institutional support, intergroup engagement processes, temporal development, and knowledge). This paper summarizes an expert-informed conceptualization of psychologically-relevant components developed by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from psychology, philosophy, and political science. In doing so, this paper offers a foundation for social scientists to further study and operationalize the psychological foundations of this construct.