Ramachandra Guha: What the apparent defeat of Gandhi’s pursuit of religious pluralism could teach us

One of the great challenges of the modern world is how to get people of different faiths to live peaceably together. The creation of nation-states on the principle of religious majoritarianism in the Middle East and South Asia and the migration of non-Christian populations to Europe and North America have generated bitter and often violent conflicts on the basis of religion. Arrogance and a sense of superiority generally tend to win out over tolerance and mutual understanding.

The case for greater inter-faith understanding has been persuasiv­ely made by the American scholar, Thomas Albert Howard, in his book, The Faith of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (New Hav­en: Yale University Press, 2021). Much of Howard’s book focuses on Chri­sti­anity, the religion he is himself most familiar with. Christian theologians were once utterly convinced that theirs was the only true faith.

In the twentieth century, this began to change. Once known for its spiritual arrogance, in the 1960s, the Catholic Church began a slow process of acceptance of other faiths. In an encyclical of August 1964, the pope said that his Church would “recognise and respect the moral and spiritual values of the various non-Christian religions”. A quarter century later, another pope went further, remarking that “dialogue...

Read more