WILLIAM E. CONNOLLYtions.The image of a national majority around which minorities of different types revolve is
eventually transfigured into the image of interdependent minorities of different types, each of
which needs to sustain connections with numerous others to generate practices of common
governance.This effect is accomplished both by drawing multiple minorities out of the
closet and by amplifying public awareness of a multidimensional diversity that is already
in motion below the static images of national self-representation. The most positive result
of such a process is to transfigure the myth of a uniform majority that tolerates or re-
presses a set of discrete minorities ranged around it into a visible culture of interdepen-
dent minorities of multiple types negotiating a generous ethos of governance between
them. In the most promising scenario, every individual and every constituency now be-
comes a minority along one or more dimensions.^29
No automatism governs this process; it can be derailed at any point. It is almost as
susceptible to derailment as the pursuit of the unified nation is to the violent repression
of selected minorities or devolution into a civil war between militant contenders seeking
to occupy the authoritative center.
If and when muiltidimensional pluralization is well underway, itamplifieswithin each
institutional faith an experience already there. Most institutional faiths are punctuated by
a moment of mystery, abyss, rupture, openness, or difference within the faith that compli-
cates or confounds the experience of faith. It is precisely at this point in their own prac-
tices that the faithful identify a stutter in their own creed, sometimes drawing upon this
sense of creedal insufficiency to inspire presumptive generosity toward other creeds. For
Christians, this might be the element of mystery or trembling that Augustine and Kierke-
gaard respectively emphasize; for Buddhists, it might be the point at which the apparently
solid self encounters the absence of the ego in a world without a designing God; for
Muslims, it might be the moment of mystical reception of the difference between finitude
and infinity; for nontheists, it might be the element of abundance, creativity, and unpre-
dictability that inhabits a world of becoming; and for Jews, it might be the ineffable
dimension of divinity that makes it inappropriate to name the nameless one. In each case,
the gap opens up an element of mystery, rupture, or difference that evades or resists
definitive interpretation.
This internal element is fateful to the politics of pluralism, for at this juncture some
of the faithful are moved to deny or repress such a moment in the interests of asserting
political hegemony over other faiths. It is the moment when, in effect, many are tempted
to call the devotees of other faiths faithless, nihilists, subjectivists, relativists, or rootless,
on the way to vindicating their marginalization, or worse. There is a long history of this.
Sometimes it acquires an ironic twist, as when Kantian Christians asserted that Jewish
legalism makes its proponents unalert to the rupture in faith and therefore not qualified
to be full citizens in Europe. Today, I call attention to a variant of this phenomenon that
still falls below the radar of many defenders of the religions of the Book, for many of
these assert with confidence that, while faith intranscendence—which might assume the
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