Pluralism, authority and legitimation of the creed: institutionalized and uni-versalist religions in the road of the new times

Abstract

Starting from the affirmation of religious-cultural pluralism as consolidated ethos and normative basis of the contemporary societies, I will reflect on the challenges posed by it to religious-cultural institutions and to the type of essentialist and naturalized foundation that they foment individually and socially. My main argument consists in defend that religious-cultural pluralism, which has a sense totally positive and is deeply rooted in our current daily life, leads to weakening of authority of these religious-cultural institutions, undermining their power to monopolize and centralize internally the legitimation of the creed, imposing it vertically to believers and non-believers. I will defend also that religious-cultural pluralism not only can be ignored or minimized by religious-cultural institutions, but can offer an important and unsurpassable normative basis to the institutional reformulation and restructuring, in the sense of consolidate, in religious-cultural institutions, discursive moderation, democratic openness to believers and non-believers, weakening of essentialist and naturalized foundations, welcome to otherness, and containment of missionary and messianic tendencies that try to frame, from out and with no sensibility, the religious-cultural contexts historically located.