Dispatch Faith: Religious Tolerance Isn’t Good Enough, by Michael Reneau (Managing Editor, The Dispatch):
Texas has become ground zero for the new wars of religious toleration, with Republicans and conservatives considering legislation barring Muslims from certain religious practices in the state. Religious tolerance has been an American creed since its founding, but what if tolerance is not enough?
Religious scholar Iqbal Akhtar argues for something beyond the mere truce that tolerance allows in today’s Dispatch Faith. Instead, he proposes a more full-throated promise to protect the rightxs of others, what he calls “covenantal pluralism.” Such a commitment, he argues, is the kind of thing that can help hold the U.S. together as it further atomizes.
Dispatch Faith: Beyond Tolerance, by Iqbal Akhtar (Florida International University; Founder & Executive Director, The East-West Foundation):
A faith secure in its own truth need not fear its neighbors’ freedom, and protecting that freedom is the surest guarantee of one’s own.
Religious difference is no longer something Americans encounter at a distance. It is the texture of an ordinary Tuesday: the Hindu family two doors down, the Muslim colleague, the Pentecostal in the next cubicle, the neighbor who believes none of it and is polite about saying so. For most of our history we have managed this the way strangers manage a shared fence: with tolerance.
That was adequate when difference was mostly a matter of which Protestant church one attended. It is no longer adequate now that our neighbors’ convictions are not merely unfamiliar but genuinely rival accounts of what a human being is for. Our age of globalization and “superdiversity” means we need to maintain cohesion and a national purpose by managing the centrifugal forces of diversity. As the country passed its 250th year, the question is not whether we can put up with one another. It is whether we can commit to one another.
The scholars Chris Seiple, W. Christopher Stewart, and Dennis Hoover gave the alternative to mere tolerance a name in 2020: covenantal pluralism. It is not a truce between rival faiths but a positive, mutual commitment to protect one another’s freedom to be wrong. But I would push the idea one step further: The work is not only to protect my neighbor’s liberty but to understand his tradition well enough to learn something from it, and to build from that a shared vision of human flourishing.
The realist suspects that taking religion this seriously invites crusades. The evidence runs the other way. The cross-national research of sociologists Brian Grim and Roger Finke found that violent religious conflict tracks religious repression far more closely than religious fervor: restriction breeds grievance, grievance breeds radicalization, and radicalization is then cited to justify further restriction. It is where faith is caged and surveilled that it curdles into the militancy the realist fears. The conflict in Kashmir is an important example of how Hindu and Muslim conflict can be further weaponized by states to undermine a pluralistic peace that lasted centuries.
The believer worries about the opposite thing, that pluralism requires him to treat his convictions as one option at a spiritual buffet. It does not. Covenantal pluralism asks him to believe no less and to love more, and his own tradition likely already supplies the reason, beginning with the insight that faith compelled is not faith at all. The two objections cancel each other out. One fears too much religion and the other too little, and both assume that public life must choose between faith fully expressed and faith safely contained.
Covenantal pluralism is the more confident position, not the weaker one. A faith secure in its own truth need not fear its neighbors’ freedom, and protecting that freedom is the surest guarantee of one’s own. That is a conservative insight in the oldest sense: Ordered liberty, not enforced uniformity, is what holds a diverse people together over time.
Iqbal Akhtar, (Florida International University), Covenantal Pluralism: The Geopolitics of Interfaith Religious Freedom (2026) (open access):
This open access book examines the role of religion in the emerging academic and policy discourses on the polycrisis—also termed the metacrisis or permacrisis. Drawing on philosophy, economics, and the comparative study of religion, the book develops a conceptual map and shared vocabulary for engaging the interlocking challenges of our age, which threaten multiple simultaneous regional instabilities across the world system. As current political, economic, social, and ecological frameworks are stretched to their limits, Akhtar explores how the world’s religious traditions can be accessed as sources of spiritual inspiration and moral imagination to chart new pathways beyond our collective paralysis. Advancing a covenantal pluralistic response, the volume offers scholars, students, and policymakers a generative framework for navigating overlapping crises through interreligious wisdom. Essential reading for those working at the intersection of religion, ethics, public policy, and the global polycrisis.
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