Pluralism, confusion and the roads to God

By Abdu Murray, Op-ed contributor Friday, June 23, 2023

You’ve seen the headlines: Fifty six percent of American evangelicals believe there are many ways to God, up from the already surprising 42% reported in 2020. There are, of course, many contributing factors to this drift from the very core of the Christian message that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.” An obvious one is that only 37% of pastors have a biblical worldview.

But another factor may be less obvious but even more fundamental: pluralism, as practiced in America, has caused us to equate disagreeing with someone’s beliefs with disrespecting the person who holds those beliefs.

Pluralism is a good thing and religious pluralism is especially good. It allows us to explore different claims about the most important questions of life, like purpose, meaning, and destiny. We once explored those claims in what Os Guinness calls the Civil Public Square. The problem today is that the public square isn’t always very civil. In the past few decades, our religious rhetoric had become so heated that all we ever seemed to do is inflame each other’s anger. We grew weary of the vitriol, so society underwent a pendular swing. To avoid hurting anyone’s feelings, we decided that we can no longer scrutinize anyone’s religious claims (well, almost anyone’s).

Accordingly, we’ve shunned almost all religious debate. When someone makes a religious claim, we can’t ask probing questions. We have to smile and nod with interest, lest we be branded intolerant. The cost of avoiding that stigma has been ignorance about the richness of the various religious traditions. That self-imposed ignorance gives birth to a confusion with many heads. We confuse engaging in argumentation with quarreling.

We confuse disagreeing with someone's beliefs with disrespecting the person. In fact, we’ve obliterated the difference between people and ideas altogether. Where we once could challenge a person’s beliefs without necessarily denigrating that person, we now think that challenging certain beliefs is identical to denigrating the person who holds them.

This mutation of pluralism is especially puzzling given that we don’t seem to hold back on invective and criticism in other areas of life. Stephen Prothero points out that while no one argues that differing economic and political systems are essentially the same, religion enjoys a privileged status. “Scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, essentially the same,” he writes. We conjure up that miracle of the imagination from our preference to avoid doing the hard and uncomfortable work of honestly assessing what the world’s most cherished views have to say. What’s become more important is that we’re seen as tolerant across the religious board. Personal preferences have dominated facts and truth yet again. Confusion about whether any particular religion is true has become a virtue. Clarity about the differences in religion — and that they can’t all be right — has become a vice.

The Culture of Confusion’s comforting mantras are easily identifiable. There are many paths up the spiritual mountain. All roads lead to God. The sentiments of mutual respect that underlie these mantras are well-meaning enough. But their simplistic gloss does exactly the opposite of what they intend. Rather than express a deep understanding of world religions, today’s popular mantras convey flippancy and disrespect for them.

Take, for example, the mantra All roads lead to God. Christianity claims that only through Christ’s atoning death on the cross can we be reconciled to God and delight in his presence for eternity. Islam disagrees with every aspect of that claim. In Islam, only if our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds and God has mercy on us will we enter into God’s paradise. But God Himself is not there because he doesn’t condescend to dwell among humans. In Hinduism, one is not trying to reach God; one is trying to become God. The Hindu scriptures teach that every person’s soul is one with the divine, eternal absolute. Buddhism, on the other hand, was founded in rejection of the Hindu belief that we have a divine self. In classical Buddhism, there is no self at all and there is no divine being. There is simply the Void, and our goal is to become extinguished into the Void. Confucianism is utterly uninterested in the afterlife at all. What matters is this life and the social structures in which we conduct ourselves. Not only are these roads all different, but they also claim different destinations. How can all roads lead to God if not all the roads even claim to?

Fundamental differences between world religions are far more common than superficial similarities. To ignore our differences is to disrespect each other. In short, our differences make a difference. Affording to each other what I call the dignity of difference is key if we are to have genuine tolerance and a sincere journey to truth.

Recognizing and honestly wrestling with these diverse claims affords religious people the dignity of difference. If we don’t acknowledge the fundamental differences, we end up disrespecting thousands of years of each religion’s traditions and theological development. Personally, I take the claims of non-Christian religions too seriously to say that we all believe the same things. For the Muslim, it is blasphemous to believe that Jesus is the Son of God or that God is a triune being. In Christianity, it is heretical to deny those beliefs. How dare I tell a Muslim that she believes the same thing I do? To tell a Buddhist that his beliefs are basically the same as a Hindu’s is to disrespect thousands of years of Buddhist thought. To claim that all roads lead to God isn’t only illogical, it’s disrespectful.

Adapted from SAVING TRUTH: FINDING MEANING AND CLARITY IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD. Copyright © 2018 by Abdu Murray. Published by Zondervan, a division of. HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Abdu Murray offers the credibility of the gospel message as a speaker and writer with Embrace the Truth. He has written several books, including Saving Truth, Grand Central Question, Apocalypse Later, and his latest, More than a White Man’s Religion. For most of his life, Abdu was a proud Muslim until a nine-year historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific investigation pointed him to the Christian faith.

Abdu has spoken to diverse international audiences and has participated in debates and dialogues across the globe. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School. Abdu lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their three children.