Oct. 7 was not the first time that interfaith efforts of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others faced disruption. In New York City, 9/11 led to an increase in interfaith activities. In larger cities, interfaith centers were established to bring together faith leaders from different religious traditions for dialogue and prayer. In smaller cities, however, interfaith work remains less institutionalized and instead relies more on local participants without formal leadership.
Informal institutions and cultural norms prevail everywhere but people moving across religious boundaries, language barriers, and national borders often find themselves transgressing unfamiliar local cultural norms. Therefore, the impact of disruptive events like Oct. 7 or 9/11 varies across multifaith communities.
Participant observation over a 12-month period in 2024/2025 and ethnographic interviews with 60 participants in two North Atlantic nations—the United States and Germany—indicates that cultural transgressions are less tolerated in regions with less religious pluralism. There appears to be more forgiveness of cultural transgressions in more pluralistic regions with sustained interfaith activities because in such settings sometimes the transgressor is variably also transgressed.
The Abrahamic religions teach that humans transgress by their very human nature. Adam and Eve already broke one rule God imposed by eating fruit from a particular tree. However, the Abrahamic religions also teach that human transgressions may be forgiven by God. If local communities find no mechanisms for forgiving cultural transgressions in religious encounters across faith traditions, the fear of transgression could hinder interreligious dialogue, especially after disruptive events, putting interfaith work at risk.
This presentation is intended as a workshop. It draws on two aspects of the author’s current work: (1) ethnographic fieldwork involving participant observation and interfaith interviews in Europe and North America, (2) interdisciplinary research with undergraduate students who assisted in conducting some of the interviews in New York City, and, as a research team, represent another instance of interreligious dialogue.
This work has resulted in an empirical paper that will be presented at the Biannual Conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in June. It would be a tremendous opportunity to also develop the ethnographic material into a workshop for the Interreligious Studies Unit at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November 2025.
The original paper is titled "Crossing Lines in Interfaith Work: Cultural Transgressions and Forgiveness in Practice." The workshop will be titled “(Measuring) The Impact of Religious Pluralism on Interfaith Dialogue in Different Regions” because the focus will be less on the observed practice of forgiveness (or its absence) in instances where participants in interfaith dialogue have violated unspoken cultural norms, and more on how researchers can identify (and measure) significant variables from interview transcripts and ethnographic field notes across regions where conflicts threaten to disrupt interfaith work.
Workshop participants will have the opportunity to share and reflect on their interfaith experiences, whether these were gained through everyday participation or systematic research. They may have also found that interfaith work was affected by events like Oct. 7 or 9/11, or be able to identify other significant occurrences relevant to the region studied. Additionally, they might have observed cultural norms being established by some and then violated by others within communities that practice interfaith dialogue. The discussion with workshop participants is expected to reveal several variables that might remain unnoticed until we analyze interview transcripts and prepare relevant variables for comparative analysis.
The workshop should benefit scholars engaged in interreligious and interfaith contexts, particularly those whose work bridges urban and rural divides, religious and secular populations, and regions with varying levels of religious pluralism.
Oct. 7 was not the first time that interfaith efforts faced disruption. In New York City, 9/11 led to an increase in interfaith activities. In larger cities, interfaith centers were established to bring together faith leaders from different religious traditions for dialogue and prayer. In smaller cities, however, interfaith work remains less institutionalized and instead relies more on local participants without formal leadership. Informal institutions and cultural norms prevail everywhere but people moving across religious boundaries, language barriers, and national borders often find themselves transgressing unfamiliar local cultural norms. Therefore, the impact of disruptive events like Oct 7 or 9/11 varies across multifaith communities. Ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and the United States indicates that cultural transgressions are less tolerated in regions with less religious pluralism. There appears to be more forgiveness in more pluralistic regions with sustained interfaith activities because in such settings sometimes the transgressor is variably also transgressed.