Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity. By Lori Beaman

How should we navigate the waters of religious pluralism and diversity? Answering this question almost always takes us to discussions of laws, rules, and court decisions concerning freedom of religion. In Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity, religious studies scholar Lori Beaman urges us to shift our attention and instead look for answers in everyday instances of people negotiating their religious differences. The starting point of her inquiry is to go beyond the reified frameworks of religion and religious identity by looking at the “micro-processes that make up the everyday negotiation of difference” (3). What we see from this bottom-up lens is the emergence of the notion of deep equality—a lived state and a process—as a new foundation for these interactions. Exploring the conditions under which deep equality might or might not emerge or flourish is the main aim of this book. In its frequent invocations of the importance of mundane everyday interactions, Deep Equality shows its great ambition. It engages in a thorough and comprehensive ground-clearing effort to decenter law and its hegemonic claim on our civic imaginations, to disturb a commonplace static vision of religion, and to displace tolerance and accommodation as the organizing language of public discourse around religious diversity. The book makes its argument using films, novels, interviews, court decisions, and other kinds of ethnographic material, and shows how religious individuals and communities are more than just the religious markers people assign to each other. In the first chapter, Beaman questions the rigidity of identity differences and the tendency to use religion as the primary point of reference in relating to others. Her examination of lived religion in films, academic studies, and in her own fieldwork highlights the complexity of identity and the harmful consequences of putting people in boxes. The second chapter provides a roadmap on how deep equality can be achieved by emphasizing local solutions over national ones, and highlighting examples involving empathy, respect, and cooperation. She cites, for instance, the focus on positive responses from submissions made before the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, headed by prominent Canadian sociologist Gerard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor. The body was tasked by then Quebec Premier Jean Charest in 2008 to take stock of accommodation practices throughout the province.

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