ABSTRACT
There are two relevant kinds of religious pluralism, both massively present in the world today. The first and historically the earliest is communal pluralism, which consists in the more or less tolerated propinquity of faiths, usually within a larger social unit, and where for the most part one community is superior and central and the others inferior and peripheral. However, straightforward competition is unlikely except in so far as people in the inferior communities find it advantageous to assimilate to the superior. The second kind of pluralism is relatively recent unless we count the kind of shopping among the gods in the Roman empire or, indeed, in some traditional oriental societies. It consists in the open competition of life-worlds and styles, each with a stall – more or less centrally placed – in the supermarket of beliefs. We have to look at both these kinds of pluralism as they contract and expand in the contemporary world.
