Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy & Covenantal Pluralism

Equipping individuals and institutions to build trust across deep differences—laying the foundation for religious freedom, social cohesion, and shared prosperity.

Building Trust Across Deep Difference

To create lasting religious freedom, we must go deeper than advocacy and even beyond cooperative engagement—we must build the capacity for people to understand and work with others across the world’s deepest cultural, religious, and political differences. This is the purpose of Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL) and Covenantal Pluralism.

What is Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL)?

CCRL is not just about knowing facts about other religions. It’s about engaging the “other” in meaningful, mutually respectful ways that build trust and enable long-term collaboration. It begins with:

  • Understanding your own beliefs and how they shape engagement

  • Understanding others as they understand themselves

  • Taking responsibility to work together for the common good

Our Partner, Love Your Neighbor Community, shares:

The tagline of CCRL is this: “There is you, the other, and what you do together.” CCRL is not “religious literacy,” the textbook knowledge about religions (in various contexts). CCRL goes a step further, includes the one who is engaging. It is a positive and proactive response to the world’s global challenges, a framework for mutually respectful engagement pursuant practical and enduring impact. It requires introspection and a deepening understanding of one’s own moral framework and what it says about engaging the other. It demands an understanding of others as they understand themselves, their moral framework and what it says about engaging you. And it expects leadership as people who share the same human dignity to work across theological and political difference to build something that serves everyone. This building requires the skills of evaluation, negotiation, and communication.

In the CCRL construct, diversity is not a goal in and of itself, but a description of demographic fact, of living side-by-side, of tolerating one another without engaging each other.

The practice of CCRL presupposes, embodies, and expresses all of these dimensions. CCRL is a framework of engagement bringing religious freedom and religious responsibility together; that is, it brings equal citizens together to take take on our world’s greatest challenges, building dynamic and resilient societies, and states, as a result. In other words, the core commodity of CCRL is trust— it usually begins in the transactional, but if sustained, becomes transformational.

Put one last way: CCRL builds teachers who embody an empathetic and elicitive engagement methodology, as demonstrated in the “classroom” (of life), that ripples across the campus.

What is Covenantal Pluralism?

Covenantal Pluralism is a vision of society where individuals and communities are free and equal under the law, responsible for one another in culture, and committed to working together despite disagreement. It is not about blending beliefs or minimizing differences—it’s about protecting freedom while fostering mutual respect.

It has three essential dimensions:

  1. Freedom of religion or belief for all, regardless of background

  2. Cross-cultural religious literacy, practiced across sectors and borders

  3. Character virtues, such as humility, empathy, and civic responsibility

Our Partner, Love Your Neighbor Community, shares:

Covenantal Pluralism is the engagement of difference under positive conditions (freedom and fairness) and in a positive spirit (mutually respectful and loving).

As summarized in “Toward a Global Covenant of Peaceable Neighborhood,” Covenantal pluralism is simultaneously about “top-down” legal and policy parameters and “bottom-up” cultural norms and practices. A world of covenantal pluralism is characterized both by a constitutional order of equal rights and responsibilities and by a culture of reciprocal commitment to engaging, respecting, and protecting the other— albeit without necessarily conceding equal veracity or moral equivalence to the beliefs and behaviors of others. The envisioned end-state is neither a thin-soup ecumenism nor vague syncretism, but rather a positive, practical, non-relativistic pluralism. It is a paradigm of civic fairness and human solidarity, a covenant of global neighborliness....

Covenantal Pluralism has three key constitutive dimensions:

(1) freedom of religion and belief (including equal treatment of all people, of any faith or none)

(2) cross-cultural religious literacy, and

(3) character virtues essential for living constructively with deep difference.