No, all religions don’t lead to God
We hear a lot these days about “re-enchantment,” by which people usually mean that Richard-Dawkins-style secular materialism is going out of style, being replaced by a renewed fascination with spirituality, the occult, and the supernatural. But this resurgent spirituality is often deeply unserious, treating actual religious doctrines like items on a buffet. That’s insulting to those who take religion seriously, but it’s also potentially dangerous to those welcoming and promoting this kind of re-enchantment.
Consider a new podcast called Soul Boom, hosted by actor Rainn Wilson, whom most will know as Dwight from “The Office.” The show’s rainbow unicorn logo says a lot about how seriously spiritual matters are being taken.
Wilson has welcomed guests from across the belief spectrum in the last year to explore “the potential for spiritual revolution,” “to instigate healing transformations,” and to “delve into what it means to be human with a body and soul,” — whatever all that means.
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The description fits nicely within Wilson’s Bahá’í faith, which teaches that “the religions of the world come from the same Source and are in essence successive chapters of one religion from God.”
According to Bahá’í writings, the “revealed religions” all ultimately lead toward the same deity. Divine “Educators” (Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and so on) who gave us the major faiths each revealed a part of that truth. But the whole truth is ultimately found in uniting their teaching — or the parts of their teaching we like.
It’s the sort of claim that goes down smoothly for those with post-Christian, pluralistic sensibilities. In fact, many modern Westerners already profess essentially this without calling themselves Bahá’í. But there are a lot of problems with the “all religions lead to God” creed.
One is that it fails to take any religion’s actual doctrines seriously. Because, of course, Islam and Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism ultimately make incompatible claims about God, reality, and salvation, yet consider those claims among their most important teachings. If Buddha is the way, Jesus is not. If the non-Trinitarian Allah of Islam is God, then he is not the Father of the Eternal Son who took on flesh, and so on.
That hasn’t stopped many modern “spiritual” people from sampling the religion buffet. Recently, Wilson was joined by YouTube comedy duo Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, AKA “Rhett and Link,” to talk about why they no longer call themselves Christians.
Rhett explained that his evangelical upbringing taught him that Jesus died and rose from the dead. He realized (correctly) that if this is true, it is “the most important thing to know.” But he came to doubt the authenticity of Christian claims and eventually distanced himself from Christianity because he didn’t think there was enough evidence.
Wilson replied — again, in line with his Bahá’í faith — that maybe Christianity doesn’t require such historically rooted dogmas as the Resurrection. Maybe Jesus didn’t claim to be God, and this was a metaphor developed by theologians trying to understand His miraculous ministry, and what really matters is Jesus’ ethical teaching — His command to “love thy neighbor.”
This, of course, is nothing new. It’s the point of the old parable about the blind men and the elephant, each feeling a part of it and describing it differently, not realizing they were all touching the same reality. The whole elephant is supposed to be some universal spirituality toward which all the world’s religions strive, but which only an enlightened few have recently grasped in its entirety.
As Tim Keller once pointed out, this assumes the parable-teller alone can see the whole elephant! Everyone who claims to know the unifying truth in all religions is claiming to have a privileged perspective and to know the whole truth.
Far from being broadminded or humble, this is actually arrogant. It’s a refusal to take any of the central claims of the world’s religions seriously enough to admit they clash. C.S. Lewis called this “patronizing nonsense” in the case of Christianity. Jesus was not crucified merely for telling people to love one another. He was crucified because He claimed to be equal with God!
This picking-and-choosing from the world’s religions and not taking any of them very seriously is a problem because spirituality is serious, the spiritual realm is real, and not all its inhabitants believe in loving their neighbors.
As Peter Leithart recently wrote at First Things, “Not every mystery should be plumbed. Tales aren’t true just because they poke scientific naturalism in the eye.” And the generic, buffet-style spirituality of Rainn Wilson’s “Soul Boom” podcast and his guests is no major improvement over secular materialism. It’s based, fundamentally, on the secular conceit that none of the world’s major religions or their truth-claims need to be taken seriously. But they do. Deadly seriously. Because mutually contradictory accounts of God, salvation, and our ultimate destiny cannot all be true.
Those claiming to worship a higher power while picking and choosing what they think is true may be fooling a lot of people these days. But the main people they’re fooling are themselves.
Originally published at BreakPoint.
Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center and host of the Upstream podcast. He has been a voice of the Colson Center since 2010 as coauthor of hundreds of Breakpoint commentaries and columns. He has also written for WORLD, The Gospel Coalition, The Federalist, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and Summit Ministries. He is most at home outdoors and underwater, loves parrots, sharks, and C.S. Lewis, and enjoys teaching his kids about all three. He and his wife, Gabriela, live with their four children in Lakeland, Florida, where they attend Christ Community Presbyterian Church.
