Religious pluralism and moving religions

Abstract

The shift from a religious hegemony context to a religious pluralism context profoundly changed religions and their relationships with people, other religions, and society in general. Two aspects of this shift were the relativization of religious conceptions and the possibility for people to move freely among religions. At the same time that religions are relativized - in the broad process of relativizing beliefs and values ​​- people affirm the right to move freely between religions. This rather complex process has brought about significant changes in the way religion is experienced. The underlying assumption of this article is that the relativization of religions and the movement of people between them is a phenomenon that, in a sense, can be understood analogously to migratory flows.
This article aims to problematize this process using three concepts in migration studies: frontier, religious identity and wandering. The assumption is that some concepts from migration studies may contribute to the analysis of religious pluralism. At first, the article examines the contexts of the three concepts; in a second moment the application of these concepts to the reality of religious pluralism and, in a third moment, points out three important axes for the study of the actual pluralism.