Pluralism is a Wound
by Christopher Cantwell
I was going to write about something else. For weeks I had planned to write about the reluctance of public historians to seriously contend with religion, which I've been ranting about on twitter for a while. But then Sunday's shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin happened. Suddenly, my interest in the more mundane controversies of American religious life seemed trivial by comparison.
I was going to write about something else. For weeks I had planned to write about the reluctance of public historians to seriously contend with religion, which I've been ranting about on twitter for a while. But then Sunday's shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin happened. Suddenly, my interest in the more mundane controversies of American religious life seemed trivial by comparison.

The response to the attack has been typical,
if appallingly sparse. Some have taken the approach of viewing Sunday's attack
as a national tragedy, an affront upon America's principles of religious
freedom that should affect us all. "Today, we
are all American Sikhs," writes filmmaker Valarie Kaur over at CNN.
Others, presuming Page confused this temple of Dastar-wearing Sikhs with
a community of turbaned Muslims, look upon the attack as further evidence that
Americans badly need to take more religious studies courses. "Ignorance breeds
hatred," writes Jana Reiss with the Religion News Service. "Hatred breeds violence." But in an important counterpoint to all of these
nationalistic or cosmopolitan responses to Page's naked violence, Amardeep Singh, an Associate
Professor of English at Lehigh University, asks whether the ability to
distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims, or an appreciation of America's
commitment to religious freedom, could really stem the fear one may have to the
embodied markers of racial or religious difference. "Whether or not that
target was actually the 'right one' was beside the point for the Oak Creek
shooter," Singh writes.
It's that both [the Dastar and the turban] have the potential
to provoke a kind of visceral reaction by these marks of religious
difference worn on the body. Sometimes that reaction is simply a sense of
discomfort or confusion, easily allayed by a winning smile or a comment about
the local sports team or the weather. Sometimes, however, that negative
reaction runs deeper and can't be readily resolved.

I don’t really have an answer. Like Singh, I’m both heartbroken and
speechless at Sunday’s tragic attack. But I also can’t help but wonder, how do
we, as scholars, educators, and advocates of American religious history approach
and address such incidents as well as the larger issues of hate and
misunderstanding they reveal? How do we utilize our classrooms, research, and
writing to create spaces that recognize and understand the fears and
vulnerabilities of a Wade Page while simultaneously diffusing them? Again, I
don’t have an answer. But I'm eager to have conversations that can suggest answers. In the
end, I hope that we’ll some day reach a point where my most pressing concern is
the lack of good articles about religion in the Public
Historian.
Comments
Finally, I had actually signed on to share this new op ed in the NYTimes which makes many of my same points in a more expanded fashion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/us/if-the-sikh-temple-had-been-a-muslim-mosque-on-religion.html?_r=3