The Work of Pluralism

In May 1870, the streets of Columbus, Ohio filled with people.

Bands played. Fraternal organizations assembled. Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, Mayor George W. Meeker, and city officials arrived in carriages. By some estimates, between six thousand and seven thousand people gathered at the corner of Friend and Third streets to witness the laying of a synagogue cornerstone.

The building would become Temple Israel, the first purpose-built synagogue in Columbus.

The crowd was not made up only of Jews. Local reporting noted a “large and intelligent attendance” of residents who were not Jewish. The foundation was surrounded “in solid mass,” with people pressing close to watch the ceremony.

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati addressed them for more than an hour. He spoke of what he called the dignity of man. Against the idea that human beings were marked by inherited depravity, he insisted on moral freedom and responsibility. “God hath made man upright,” he said. “Man only is responsible,” because man alone is free.

The synagogue, Wise suggested, would stand as a defense of that idea: “the divine acknowledgment of human dignity.”

A house of worship was being built. But something else was happening too. The city was marking the presence of a minority community as part of its own public life.

Pluralism is often described in terms of rights. The freedom to worship, to assemble, to build institutions. Those protections matter.

But scenes like the one in Columbus suggest something more. Liberal pluralism has never depended on legal permission alone. It has required repeated acts of recognition: showing up, lending space, honoring the institutions of others, and treating them as part of a shared civic landscape.

Often, the work was local and practical. 

In 1886, a Baptist congregation in Nashville found itself without a church. For months, its members gathered not in a temporary hall, but in a synagogue. The rabbi adjusted his own congregation’s schedule so the Baptists could continue to meet. When the church returned to its building, members adopted a formal resolution of thanks, describing the gesture as “the highest type of kindness.”

In 1902, after a fire destroyed the First Congregational Church in Springfield, Ohio, its congregation accepted an offer to hold services in a synagogue. Members of the two communities read responsively from the Hebrew prayer book and sang from the Congregational hymnal. The arrangement lasted until the church could rebuild. Years later, the relationship endured.

Such moments did not erase difference. A synagogue remained a synagogue, a church a church. But each could, at times, be treated as part of the same civic world.

The pattern was not only Jewish and Christian. In 1937, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the third anniversary of what is now known as the Mother Mosque of America was marked by a public program designed so that non-Arabic speakers could follow along. Neighbors were invited. State officials spoke in praise of religious diversity. The mosque, built by immigrants, was presented as a legible and welcomed part of American life.

The point is not that these scenes were perfect. It is that they were practiced. Repeated across places and generations, they taught people how to live with difference without dissolving it.

But no practice continues simply because it once existed.

In 1866, Otto von Bismarck attended the dedication of Berlin’s New Synagogue. Its grand dome stood as a symbol of Jewish integration, and the presence of political leadership lent the ceremony a civic character familiar from American examples. For a time, similar moments of recognition could be found across Central Europe.

But those scenes did not endure. The same synagogue was desecrated during Kristallnacht in 1938. The broader world in which such ceremonies had meaning collapsed with it.

After the war, Germany rebuilt some of what had been destroyed. In 1959, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer attended the dedication of a synagogue in Cologne. The moment was described as tense and quiet, less a celebration than a reckoning. Pluralism, in that setting, had to be reconstructed deliberately, and without any assumption that it would sustain itself.

The lesson is not that one country possessed pluralism and another did not. It is that recognition can exist in one moment but not exist in a later moment. In both Germany and the United States, recognition was possible. In both places, it has proven fragile.

Columbus is not an abstract place for me. It was the first Jewish community I came to know closely.

It was also where I led a campus Hillel, at a Lutheran university, sustained in significant part by the presence of people who were not Jewish but showed up anyway. They helped carry a nine-foot menorah. They reinforced a sukkah so it would not collapse. They treated what a few Jewish students were building as something that was worth supporting by the entire campus.

I began researching Ohio’s small-town Jewish histories in my senior year. I recognized the stories I found. 

In city after city, the same kinds of scenes appeared: cornerstone-layings that drew overflowing crowds, dedications attended by clergy and officials from other traditions, congregations lending space to one another in times of need. These were not isolated gestures. They formed a pattern, uneven but persistent.

That pattern complicates how American religious history is often remembered. It does not erase exclusion, prejudice, or violence. Those are part of the record. But it suggests that alongside them, there has also been a multi-generational tradition of recognition, one in which minority communities were, at times, welcomed into the civic fabric in visible and concrete ways.

Such a tradition does not sustain itself automatically. It depends on repetition. It requires people to act in ways that affirm the dignity and presence of others, even when difference remains.

In January 2026, more than one thousand people packed a city council meeting in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where officials rejected a rezoning request for what would have been the city’s first formal mosque. City staff and the planning commission had both recommended approval. Yet after weeks of debate, some of it marked by claims that the mosque would harbor terrorists or contribute to an “incursion of Islam,” the council voted it down. 

The older record helps clarify what is at stake. Pluralism is not only tested when a synagogue, church, mosque, or temple is attacked. It is also tested when one is built, entered, dedicated, borrowed, supported, or welcomed as part of the community. What does it mean, now, to show up for one another when agreement is incomplete? The answer may begin with remembering the habits of neighborliness.

The religious picture of the United States has grown more diverse since that crowd gathered in Columbus back in 1870, and the visibility of many faiths has grown with it. Mosques, temples, gurdwaras, synagogues, churches, and other houses of worship now share the same civic landscape in cities and towns across the country. Their presence can be treated with suspicion or as an ordinary part of American life.

The difference between those responses is not small. 

Featured image is "Temple Israel, Columbus, Ohio," author unknown.