A Sociological Breakthrough of Interreligious Engagement in Everyday-Symbolic Interaction Perspectives

This article explores the symbolic interaction, interfaith daily in Indonesia and beyond. The question of how one can live peacefully in a multireligious environment that has colored a discussion about interfaith engagement in many regions of the world. This article begins with a discussion of interfaith relations by introducing the history of migration in Europe. Having developed an awareness of everyday symbolic in migrant-host relationship, this article studied the effect of migration to interfaith engagement in Europe and the United States. Interfaith engagement in this sense is a means of building peace in many parts of the world, including Indonesia. Based on the sociological context of interreligious relations, the article criticized the rigidity of interreligious dialogue is stuck in the official forums related to religious issues. Therefore, religious dialogue based on everyday relationships become important to create the same sphere where everyone has the same solidarity and understanding with all those who have faith and religion are different. [Artikel ini mengeksplorasi interaksi simbolis antariman seharihari di Indonesia dan di luar. Pertanyaan bagaimana seseorang dapat hidup secara damai di lingkungan yang multiagama telah mewarnai diskusi tentang keterlibatan lintas agama (interreligious engagement) di banyak wilayah di dunia. Artikel ini dimulai dengan diskusi tentang hubungan antaragama dengan


Introduction
This article analyzes the contribution of inter-religious engagements as a contribution to the construction of contemporary society.The article addresses a critical question: How everyday-symbolic interactions develop the dynamic of religious pluralism practices, namely interreligious encounters?The research touches on Indonesian experiences of interreligious relationships, which appear to show that hopes for mutual understanding in society remains largely unfulfilled, thus posing a challenge to many believers.
The study of interreligious engagement or dialogue is unquestionably compelling nowadays.The issue of religious conflict has led to interreligious and intra-religious conflict across the globe.Although interreligious engagement and conflict happened in the past, an important aspect of the current problem is that the encounter between believers in this borderless world is taking place on a scale unprecedented in the history of human beings.Migrations of people from third world countries to Europe and America have created much diverse pictures of human encounters than in the past.In addition, in the The interaction with people of different skin colors, traditions, and religions, has created a more plural face of Western society.As a result of this encounter, Western society has become symbolically more multi-religious society.From the perspective of Herbert Mead's concept of symbolic interaction, 5 this changing situation in Western countries has shaped a new awareness among groups who encounter people from other faiths.Mead's argument is centered on relationships between mind, society, and shared symbols.He critiques Rene Decartes' "cogito ergo sum" as selfishness.For Mead, the Cartesian selfishness traps one in one's personal mind, with human beings understood live within the boundary of the self.In contrast, Mead believes that the relationship between society and the self is necessary, and that shared symbols are the means by which the relationship in forged and fostered.Symbolic interactionism in Mead's thinking requires social communication. 6In this sense, the coming of immigrants who have different religions from that of European religions brings about a social fact that the existing religions must share the religious market with religious others.When other religious symbols penetrate the West, social communication needs to be the main tool of interactions between the two entities.Ever since the encounter took place, the interaction has shifted the European paradigm of Christianity from being the dominant religion in the public sphere. 7In addition, European Christians, who had supported imperialism and evangelism previously, are concluding that it is impossible to convert all human beings who hold religions other than Christianity.The conversion of John Hicks, initially a fundamentalist who grew to become a prominent figure in the theory of religious pluralism, 8 illustrates Mead's argument on symbolic interactionism and social communication in Western society.Mead argues that interaction and communication with 5 Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967), 61. 6Ibid., 68. 7John T.S. Madeley, "Deus ex Machina; Representing God on the stage of the European Union," in Representing Religion in the European Union: Does God Matter?, ed.Lucian N. Leustean (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 52-56. 8 John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1982), 14. other symbols will open new perspectives and attitudes toward the others.9 The encounter brings about a new collective consciousness to Western countries.Collective consciousness in Durkheim's perspective is "the shared mental and moral orientation of societies."10Seen from the perspective of today's plural world, this means that in the West, the existing religious followers in this sense must share the collective mental and moral orientation with people from other religions.In modern French society, the interaction of Islam and Republic illustrates the transformation of collective consciousness from a singular laicite (secularism) based on the remnants of Christian (Protestant and Catholic) morality, to the accommodation of Islam within the French public sphere.Daniele Hervieu-Leger points out that "many young Muslims claim to live, publicly and collectively, according to an Islam which they have appropriated as a fundamental dimension of their cultural and social identity." 11The externalization of the Islamic symbol in the public sphere creates a new social mental and morality.Similarly, the United States of America, which developed previously out of a Judeo-Christian foundation, must accommodate the values of newly entering religions, as well as Native American religions, into American public life.Yvonne Haddad and Adair Lummis argue that Islam brings positive value for American society.They show that Muslims who have lived in the USA for a long-time use preaches to inspire the Muslim community to engage peacefully with the host society.12In many public events, the symbol of Islam has already taken its place in American public life.For instance, Muslim students and teachers who dress up in hijab as well as develop mosques by campuses have introduced Islamic symbol to the USA public sphere.
The posture of pluralistic society in modern world is the result of globalization of humans, values, and technology.Thomas Friedman divides globalization into three phases: first, colonialism beginning with the era of Columbus; second, migration driven by economic and the expansion of Multi-National Corporations; and third, the development of digital communications and fiber optics cable that created a "flatworld" platform. 13Peter Berger sees this encounter as an inevitable process of globalization."The "new pluralism", of course, is the result of globalization.Almost all societies are today inevitably pluralistic.Globalization has meant an enormous increase in intercultural communication." 14 Accordingly, religious believers in the globalization age need to engage deeply with people of other religions.The encounter may help religious adherents to shape new attitude towards people from other faiths.Thomas Banchoff points out, "new communications technologies not only enable the creation and sustenance of transnational religious communities, thereby sustaining a high degree of religious pluralism in world politics, but also foster an internal diversification of religious traditions." 15New communication technologies in the globalization era have improved very rapidly, making the world a "global village." 16Banchoff also adds, "the geographic extension and mobilization of religious communities through communication technologies also deepen their interaction with one another." 17deed, religious dialogue is a key factor in promoting understanding, in which openness and willingness to learn from other religious traditions are central values.Religious scholars, like John Cobb,Jr.,who crossed over to Buddhist teachings,18 and Seyyed Hossein Nasr who offered reflections on Islam and religious pluralism to encourage Muslims to go deeper into the terrain of religious others, 19 are examples of interreligious engagement in this borderless world.Komarudin Hidayat, an Indonesian Muslim scholar, who developed his thinking from the Indonesian pluralistic context, believes that interreligious engagements should be begun with a passing over into other religious terrain. 20In Peter Berger's concept, interreligious engagements call for externalization, objectivation, and internalization. 21Berger understands externalization as the process of human being physical and mental outpouring into society.Objectivation for him is the human being's acceptance of physical and mental product when human encounters different reality.Internalization in Berger's mind is the transformation of physical and mental reality into the structure of subjective consciousness. 22Encounters with religious others is a trigger that moves a religious community to share religious values and beliefs in the public sphere.Each community involved in this encounter engages critically but sympathetically with the understanding of other religions.The encounter, then, creates a new attitude toward other people.The attitude of one person toward people of other religions might vary according to individual perspective and experience, but people who engage with other religious people in a prolonged manner, will have greater potential to build bridges with other religious communities.

Interreligious Engagement Beyond Formal Dialogue
Scholars differ in their idea of the basics of interreligious engagements or dialogue.Leonard Swidler, who marked interreligious dialogue as a formal process, believes that interreligious dialogue is a set of conversations.After spending years of his academic life on interfaith relationships, Swidler concludes that dialogue (interreligious dialogue) "is conversation between two or more persons with differing views, the primary purpose of which is for each participant to learn from the other so that he or she can change and grow."23Unlike Swilder, Nancy T. Ammerman and Diana Eck agree that interreligious dialogue also develop through everyday entanglements.In Nancy T. Ammerman's perspective, interreligious dialogue can be based on "everyday strategies of action…Those everyday strategies take place not only across cultural and religious traditions but also across the multiple settings in which modern people create a life." 24For Eck, dialogue of life or dialogue in community is based on people's daily activities and ordinary relationships. 25To borrow from Bourdieu, everyday activities create cultural capital 26 for interreligious engagements or dialogue.In a given society, everyday activities create a reflective understanding of in-group communication, or doxastic, to use Bourdieu's term. 27ana Eck's dialogue of life or dialogue in community has been tested by J.B. Banawiratma in Indonesia, and Ina Merdjanova and Partice Brodeur in the Balkans.Banawiratma, an Indonesian Catholic scholar who works for interfaith relationships at the grass-roots level, concludes that interfaith engagement is developed on a "common concern." 28He argues, "in daily life men and women of different religions experience a common situation, with its anxieties and hopes, out of which their common concern emerges."29Likewise, Ina Merdjanova and Patrice Brodeur have studied interreligious dialogue for peacebuilding in the Balkans from which they conclude: A broader definition of interreligious dialogue could be: all forms of human communication both through speech and shared activities that help mutual understanding and cooperation between different people who self-identity religiously. 30rgen Habermas also believes in the everyday communication for dialogue in a public sphere.For Habermas, "everyday life, however, is a more promising medium for regaining the lost unity of reason than are today's expert cultures of yesteryear's classical philosophy of reason." 31Thus everyday communication, in Habermas' perspective "makes possible a kind of understanding that is based on claims to validity and thus furnishes the only real alternative to exerting influence on one another." 32terreligious dialogue requires the capacity to listen and to learn from other people.By listening and learning, each party in the dialogue has the same opportunity to share and to accept people from other faiths.Irene Oh argues, "participants in dialogue share equal opportunities to speak and their roles in dialogue are balanced." 33ialogue, here, is not necessarily a formal discussion or "high-level, high profile interreligious diplomacy" to quote Appleby. 34Marc Gopin insists that formal dialogue belongs to "educated, verbal, and aggressive people in a group encounter.However, people can engage through gestures, symbols, emotions, and shared work." 35At the same time, Mohammad Abu-Nimer believes that participating in the ritual of other religious communities is among the ways one can open horizon of interreligious dialogue and understanding.For Abu-Nimer, "in interfaith dialogue, ritual creates a mode of dialogue.Understanding other religions rituals opens the window onto meaning system of the others." 36 the field of religious studies, interreligious engagement needs a mutual understanding that enables religious followers to "cross the rubicon."Drawing on Herbert Mead's symbolic interaction, Habermas develops his communicative action, which is based on mutual understanding. 37For Habermas, mutual understanding is a backbone of social interaction "with respect to all other validity claims." 38 relationships. 41To sum up, exclusivism provides no room for interreligious engagements because on religion claims while all other religions are seriously wrong. 42Inclusivism insists that there is truth and salvation in many religions, but it remains dependent on the perspective of one given religion.For instance, from Christian perspective, Karl Rahner has pointed out that the salvation offered in Jesus Christ is available not only for those who hear Jesus name; thus, saving grace must be universally available in all cultures, without regard to geography or age. 43In Islam, the concept of Ahl al-Kitab, the "people of the book" is another example of inclusivism.Sociologically, the concept of Ahl al-Kitab draws a line between groups, namely between the followers of Abrahamic religions and the religions that fall outside this group.Zulfikar Hirji believes that the concept could be a common ground for people from Abrahamic religions: For example, the category Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book), while referring to Jews and Christians, also includes Muslims, communities for all of whom a 'messenger' and a 'book' are also central tenets of religious belief.Hence, the category of Ahl al-Kitab marks both difference as well as common ground between these religious groups. 44is common ground is a glue to bind, at least, Abrahamic religions into a fruitful interreligious engagement.For scholars like Ernest Gellner, the Islamic perspective of peace comes out of the Islamic blueprint for social order.Through Ibn Kaldun's lens, Gellner perceives an egalitarian position for scriptural communities in Islamic teaching. 45owever, exclusivism and inclusivism, or replacement and fulfillment in Knitter's work, have contributed to shaping an inequality in a given society.To borrow from Frantz Fanon, both exclusivism/replacement and inclusivism/fulfillment have situated other people in the zone of non-being.Frantz Fanon points out that the colonialism of a Western state, France in this case, in an Islamic country, Algeria, positioned the French as the master and the Algerians as the slaves.The colonial power argues that they invaded a zone of nonbeings.Those who stayed in the zone of non-being are seen as having a lack in comparison to the people from the zone of being, the colonial power. 46It is hard to imagine mutual engagement in a society where some groups have claimed the position of zone of being while putting another group into the zone of non-being.
Unlike exclusivism and inclusivism, pluralism underlines that all religions have their own salvation.Thus, in the perspective of pluralism, no religion can claim the absolute truth.The guru of religious pluralism, John Hick, proposes that all world religions relate to the Ultimate Reality, but in different ways. 47Although pluralism as pioneered by Hick appears as the most advanced means to approach other religions, scholars like Knitter and John Cobb, Jr. have criticized religious pluralism or mutuality for its inability to cross over to the land of religious others.There is no chance to go beyond dialogue because that pluralism or mutuality can only provide the foundation to understand each other's religious basis without going deeper into particular religious teaching. 48In his critique, Knitter writes that the pluralism perspective "imposes its own particular viewpoint on all the others in the name of universality."He adds, "mutualists become imperialists." 49For him, the acceptance model is a more workable foundation for interreligious engagements. 50Alwi Shihab, an Indonesian Muslim scholar, agrees that acceptance or, to borrow from John Cobb, Jr., mutual transformation, does not stop at peaceful co-existence, but extend to religious people who are able to transform themselves by having an open attitude and by learning from teachings and wisdoms of other religions. 51

Interreligious Engagement as Peacebuilding
An intense and genuine communication brings about a true acceptance and deep engagement in interreligious relationships.Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney's study of the peacemaking process in Northern Ireland describes a picture of relationships ranging between solidarity, communication, and interreligious engagement.Their study shows that the absence of communication and commitment based on solidarity creates "mutually exclusive ethno-religious blocs.The lack of communication, even unofficial communication, leads to a conflict transformation rather than social transformation." 52In peace studies, John Galtung's concept of negative peace (the absence of war) and positive peace (the existence of mutual engagement) is an important contribution.A negative peace might be overcome by conflict transformation, while social transformation is a result of the positive peace. 53For Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney, this active peacebuilding "involves commitment to behaviours, values, beliefs, and discursive formations that put peace into practice, in which peacemaking is habit, custom, and tradition, as well as ideal, in which peace effects the kinds of social relationships." 54ere Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney have juxtaposed peacemaking and peacebuilding, Thania Paffenholz goes further in echoing and claiming John Galtung that peacemaking and peacebuilding are substantially different.In Paffenholz's understanding of Galtung's peace theory: Peacemaking in a conflict resolution understanding (discussed later in this chapter) aims at removing the tensions between the conflict parties in addressing the causes of violence.Peacebuilding achieves positive peace by creating structures and institutions of peace based on justice, equity, and cooperation.In consequence, peacebuilding addresses the underlying causes of conflict and prevents their transformation into violence. 55e can conclude that peacebuilding engages people in positive peace.People from one group can work with other groups because trust and understanding have lasted in the relationship.Thus, peacebuilding might not be achieved only by formal dialogue.Rather, peacebuilding, as Lisa Schirch points out, needs to "engage people through multiple ways of learning and knowing.Peacebuilding ritual allows people to eat, drink, smell, dance, laugh, cry, and express the full range of human emotions…and develop new and creative ways of understanding their conflict." 56Schirch also adds singing and holding hands as two major ways to bring the peacebuilding ritual into the practice of understanding and peace. 57eryday activities are also important in the study of peacebuilding and civic engagement.Oliver Richmond and Audra Mitchell have illustrated the significant role and the challenge of everyday activities and agencies in peacebuilding narrative.In their words, "engaging with the everyday in peacebuilding settings simultaneously emancipates and entraps, enriches and depletes, enhance the quality of life and tightens control over it." 58Everyday forms of peacebuilding, in Richmond and Mitchell's argument provide ample room for local traditions to be the foundation of civic engagements and reconciliation because everyday peacebuilding creates space for coexistence and understanding among people in a given local community.Richmond and Mitchell also point out that the everyday forms of peacebuilding include women, who often are forced to stay away from formal and verbal peacebuilding processes.Therefore, "the everyday is viewed as the place where plurality and otherness are expressed immediately, without mediation, and in all its variety." 59Similarly, John Lederach believes that everyday activities such as song, poetry, and craft can be the means of peacebuilding through imagination and creativity.His study in the Northern Ireland and West Africa describes how collective feelings and emotions move people into recognition and understanding. 60 religious based conflict, peacebuilding seeks interreligious engagement that goes beyond mere co-existence.The Peacebuilding in this sense is a way by which religious communities find a pro-existent bond.Peacebuilding therefore, requires positive tolerance.Building from John Galtung's negative and positive peace, Meridjanova and Brodeur divide tolerance into negative tolerance and positive tolerance.They state, "we understand negative tolerance to be a position of pragmatic non-interference and bearing with difference, while positive peace means not just enduring and putting up with religious others, but engaging with respecting the others for the value of their differences." 61Learning from the Indonesian context, and based on Benedict Anderson's theory of imagined communities, 62 Bernard T. Adeney-Risakotta, an American Indonesian religious scholar, points out that positive religious engagements, or positive tolerance, brings positive memory as a community that binds people regardless of their religious affiliations.Expanding on Anderson, Adeney-Risakotta believes that positive 59 Ibid., 22. 60  memory creates a positive image toward people of other faiths, by which an imagined community is formed. 63ligious based peacebuilding leads to interfaith engagement based on common concerns, instead of grounded solely on theological perspectives.From the Islamic perspective, Ahmad Syafii Maarif mentions bringing religious tolerance into factual life, saying, "to move to this direction (respect), all of us should shift our paradigm to the level of spiritual maturity, so the principles of socio-religious tolerance become actually factual." 64From Indonesia's context, Maarif's "actually factual" means the concrete social-religious tolerance.Maarif's studies on Indonesian national ideology, Pancasila, conclude that in a diverse and multi-religious country like Indonesia, ideology might function as the shared that incorporate religious communities in the common concern for the nation and the culture of positive tolerance.Thus, he argues strongly that religious communities in a multi-religious country like Indonesia need to locate dialogue in concrete actions.Maarif points out, "the Indonesian interfaith leaders are not only buddies in religion-moral intellectual dialogues, but working on the ground to help enlighten people at the grass-roots level." 65The struggle of the Acehnese in the wake of the deadly tsunami that took 200,000 lives is one among many of the situation that started interreligious dialogue based on concrete action.In the case of Aceh, the dialogue in practice, along the lines of post-tsunami reconstructions, helped to alter Aceh Muslims's perceptions of Christians and the West.Using Bryan Turner's perspective, experience as such will shape trustworthiness among communities.Turner argues, "past experience of reliable co-operative interaction tends to enhance our general sense of the trustworthiness of other people in a community." 66Ibid.,27. 66

Conclusion
Interreligious encounter is a timely topic today when the world has become a "global village".The migrations of people and "migration" of information and technology creates a stage where people meet either physically or imaginatively.In this context, interreligious engagement finds its role to build bridges between people from different faiths.The engagement or dialogue could be either formal or non-formal, based on cannons or not depending upon the context in which the engagement or dialogue takes place.From the perspective of sociology of religion, interreligious engagement is a social capital to create better understanding and diminish prejudice and hatred among religious communities and even civilizations.
In everyday interreligious engagement or dialogue, people may employ multiple means of encounter including everyday communication, song, poetry, and ritual performance.Interreligious engagement or dialogue on a daily basis is based on people's ordinary activities and common relationships.Therefore, the engagement includes many people, not only the elite, but also in a given society.As it covers multiple layers and people, everyday interreligious engagement provides room for women and children, who have been excluded from the formal male-dominated dialogue.Therefore, in everyday dialogue, all people are able to share, speak, perform, listen, and understand.In the interfaith peacebuilding process in many countries, everyday interreligious engagement could open the gate of reconciliation and build a genuine and strong interfaith peace.Everyday dialogue needs the common ground of people creating solidarity and mutual understanding among people who hold different beliefs and faiths.
Inspired by Habermas "communicative praxis", Paul Knitter develops an acceptance model for interreligious engagement in the theologies of religions.Knitter says, …we can take up the challenge of what Jurgen Habermas calls the task of "communicative praxis."To know the truth we must be engaged in the practice of communication with others; that means really talking with and listening to people who significantly different from us. 39Paul Knitter's acceptance is different from three other models that proposed by Alan Race; exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. 40In exclusivism, no engagements are involved in interreligious 35 Marc Gopin, "The Use of the Word and Its Limits: A Critical Evaluation of Religious Dialogue as Peacemaking," in Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding, ed.David R. Smoch (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2002), 37. 36 Mohammed Abu-Nimer, "The Miracle of Transformation through Interfaith Dialogue: Are You a Believer?," in Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding, ed.David R. Smoch (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2002), 18. 37 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critiques of Functionalist Reason, trans.Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 22-23. 38Patrick Baert, Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 143. 39Paul Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (New York: Orbis Books, 2003), 12. 40 Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Pattern in Christian Theology of Religions (London: SCM Press, 1983), 14-20.
Bryan S. Turner, Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularization and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 164.180|Izak Lattu -A Sociological Breakthrough of Interreligious Engagement Thania Paffenholz, the experience transforms the image "from the enemy image to a friendly image." 67 John Paul Lederach, "The Arts and Peacebuilding: Using Imagination and Creativity," in People Building Peace II: Successful Stories of Civil Society, eds.Paul van Tongeren et.al.(Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005), 283-287. 61Ina Merdjanova and Patrice Brodeur, Religion as a Conversation Starter, 4. 62 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on Origin and Spread of Nationalism.Revised Edition (New York and London: Verso, 2006).