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Taking Back the Public Square: Peaceful Coexistence through Pedagogies of the Sacred, of Difference, and of Hope

One of the great accomplishments of modernity has been the establishment of societies in which people can live together with others whose ways of life are different than their own. Unfortunately, this achievement is currently threatened by rising forms of populism on the right and the left of the political and religious spectrums that are challenging the idea that peaceful coexistence across deep difference is a valuable social ideal. A growing chasm exists in the public deliberations of democracies around the world today in which people of diverse religious and spiritual persuasions find it increasingly difficult to communicate across difference in order to live together in a common civil society. These differences are often tied to political ideology, ethical orientation, moral proclivity, cultural identity, nationality, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and more. Consequently, extreme positions on the right and the left of the political and religious spectrums have come increasingly to dominate the public square, which challenges peaceful coexistence across difference. In this essay, I argue that the time has come to take the public square back from these extremes in diverse democratic societies by offering an alternative account of how we might live together in peaceful coexistence and a concomitant pedagogy to prepare youngsters to do so. After a brief review of diversity’s role in premodern social and political theory, I turn to the two revolutions of modernity that laid the foundation for contemporary thinking on the topic. I argue that the most influential trends in education for religious and spiritual affiliation that emerged from these modern revolutions have contributed to this chasm. One follows the political liberalism and educational thought of American philosophers Rawls (1971, 1993) and Dewey (1916, 1938), the other follows the cosmopolitan multiculturalism of German critical theorist Habermas (1985, 1991), and finally Brazilian critical pedagog Freire (2014, 2018). I then consider an alternative to these accounts of the public square, which requires a recovery of humanism grounded in the diversity liberalism of Berlin (1969) and the diversity theology of Sacks (2003) and Levinas (2005). The essay concludes with reference to some educational consequences of this analysis that draws on my own contribution to educational philosophy called pedagogy of the sacred and of difference (Alexander 2015). During premodern times, Western politics were dominated by ancient Greek philosophy according to which a virtuous society should serve a uniform vision of the good life. Plato (2008) proposed a hierarchical version of such a society, according to which each would receive resources and power according to his or her perceived capacity to