One of the most common things we hear when speaking to people about the gospel is the idea that all religions are the same. I posted the beginning of a Christian response a few weeks ago. Here’s another way to think about it.
I’m halfway through an audio version of Stephen Prothero’s book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is chair of the religion department at Boston University (and, Amazon will tell you, a New York Times bestselling author). He is by no means a believer in Christ, which is one of the reasons his observations are so surprising. We know that Islam (etc.) does not preach the same God who we preach, but it’s refreshing to hear an unbeliever admit it too. (Of course, ultimately he can’t reckon with the necessity and fact of revelation to break us out of our inability to know God authentically, but that’s another story…)
After an introduction laying out his thesis, that every religion being the same is an illusion, Prothero gives you a quick primer on each of the world’s “great” (as he calls them) religions. If you never had a religion course in college or anything like it, it is really a great way to get some basic information about each system of belief. Here’s four quick selections from the introduction to whet your appetite:
At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960’s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to All Religions Are One (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing. No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet 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, and this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture, not least in Dan Brown’s multi-million-dollar Da Vinci Code franchise. The most popular metaphor for this view portrays the great religions as different paths up the same mountain. “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge,” writes philosopher of religion Huston Smith. “At base, in foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure, the religions are distinct. Differences in culture, history, geography, and collective temperament all make for diverse starting points….But beyond these differences, the same goal beckons.” This is a comforting notion in a world in which religious violence often seems more present and potent than God. But is it true?…
One purpose of the “all religions are one” mantra is to stop this fighting and this killing. And it is comforting to pretend that the great religions make up one big, happy family. But this sentiment, however well-intentined, is neither accurate nor ethically responsible. God is not one. Faith in the unity of religions is just that – faith (perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism). And the leap that gets us there is an act of the hyperactive imagination…
They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals…
One of the most common misconceptions about the world’s religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after “the soul” in singular.