Issue 60.2 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is now available via Project Muse. For this issue, we highlight Marianne Moyaert’s essay “Interreligious Dialogue, the Religiosecular, and the Race-Religion Divide: Musing from an Interfaith Scholar (and a Catholic Theologian),” which can be accessed HERE.
What is the central argument of your J.E.S. essay?
In this essay, I explore how, in Christian and, more specifically, Roman Catholic calls for interreligious dialogue, the acceptance of the so-called religiosecular divide goes hand-in-hand with the projection of the distinction between race and religion. I hypothesize that the dialogical turn in the Roman Catholic Church contributes to what Anya Topolski has called the masking of the religioracial constellation and what Geraldine Heng has called the refusal of race. Ironically, this becomes especially clear in the document We Remember, in which the Roman Catholic Church dedicated itself to exploring the extent to which it was co-responsible for the Shoah.
How did you become interested in this topic?
As a theologian of religions and interfaith educator, I was trained—like many—to treat religion and race as distinct domains. But over time, I became increasingly aware of how this separation restricted the critical scope of my work. Engaging with scholarship in critical race and secularism studies helped me see how deeply entangled these categories are, and how theology has often functioned to obscure that entanglement.
As a theologian of religions and interfaith educator, I was trained—like many—to treat religion and race as distinct domains. But over time, I became increasingly aware of how this separation restricted the critical scope of my work. This insight deepened while writing my recent book, Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), in which I trace how Christians throughout history have imagined religious others—Jews, Muslims, heretics, and pagans—and examine how these processes of religionization intersect with racialization. Engaging with critical race and secularism studies alongside this historical work made it increasingly clear how theology has often contributed to obscuring these entanglements, rather than confronting them.
You call attention to the corpus christianum and how excluding the religio-racial other was presented as a matter of societal health in the Middle Ages—an argument that draws comparisons to xenophobic violence in both the 20th and 21st centuries. If modern racism is not, in fact, modern, how do you think it has changed in the last hundred years?
What’s changed is not the logic of exclusion but the terms in which it is justified. In the Middle Ages, Christian authorities framed Jews, Muslims, and others as bodily threats to the purity of the Christian social body. Today, that same logic resurfaces in secularized language—invoking security, civility, or integration—but continues to mark certain bodies and beliefs as out of place. Understanding these continuities is essential for meaningful theological engagement with race.
What is your next project?
My next project, co-authored with Michelle Voss Roberts, is titled Multiple Voices, Multiple Salvations: Entangling Theologies of Religions. This comparative theological project reimagines salvation by engaging voices long excluded from dominant Christian theology, foregrounding race, gender, coloniality, and ecology. Each chapter brings Christian traditions into conversation with other theological perspectives, reworking central themes through embodied and entangled approaches to explore what multiple, liberative visions of salvation might look like today.
Marianne Moyaert, Ph.D., is a Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium, where she joined the Research Unit for Systematic Theology and the Study of Religions in 2023. Previously, she was Chair of Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue at VU Amsterdam, where she led the master’s program in Interreligious Studies and the Emoena interfaith leadership program. Her research encompasses comparative theology, interreligious hermeneutics, and Jewish-Christian relations, with a particular interest in the ritual and material aspects of interfaith encounters. Since 2020, Dr. Moyaert has directed the VIDI research project Unequal Partners? a comparative ethnographic study examining how Christian-Jewish and Christian-Islamic couples in the Netherlands navigate their daily lives. She is also the editor-in-chief of Currents of Encounter, a Brill series at the intersection of theology, intercultural studies, and interfaith dialogue. A long-standing leader in the field, she serves on the steering committee for the Interreligious/Interfaith Studies group and has co-chaired the Comparative Theology group at the American Academy of Religion. Her magisterial new book, Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization (Wiley, 2024), crafts a Western European mosaic of religionization's turbulent history by unveiling how religious identities are constructed, hierarchies function, and how they are relevant for engaging diverse societies today worldwide.
