Because the dominant, implicit assumption about religion in America is moralism, and because people seeing two things that look the same (similar codes of moral conduct and post-death reward/punishment assertions) many people move on to view evaluative discussions about comparative religions with nervousness and impatience.

Religious differences have obviously caused much suffering and grief in human history. There is no question about it. As religious pluralism grows in the West, where it was less common than other places in the world, people are very interested in having the religions get along. This is where the “all religions are the same” impulse offered by Moralism is deeply attractive to many people.

If you read Christian Smith’s “Souls in Transition” which is a sociological study of the religious beliefs and behaviors of young adults you’ll quickly see that this is the solution they quickly jump to. Not only do most young people share this moralistic religious assumption, they also believe that morality is nearly innate and their moral compasses are true.

Morality is like common sense; unless you are actively resisting it, it is not hard to know what to do or to do it. The vast majority are moral intuitionists—that is, they believe that they know what is right and wrong by attending to the subjective feelings or intuitions that they sense within themselves when they find themselves in various situations or facing ethical questions. Those subjective moral intuitions are themselves reported to be the product of right moral principles implanted deeply within their consciences when they were children by their parents, teachers, pastors, and other adult authorities. That early moral socialization, their implicit account goes, is ineradicable and reliable. Having been laid down early and deep, the moral principles cannot be removed or altered. All one has to do is pay some attention to what one feels or intuits in any situation and one will definitely know what is the morally right thing to do. In this way, emerging adults profess to be navigating the moral challenges of life with relative proficiency and ease. Some say that their deeply ingrained moral principles guide them to form their relationships and practices in such ways that they actually rarely even have to face a difficult moral problem or choice in the first place.

Smith, Christian; Snell, Patricia (2009-08-10). Souls in Transition : The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Kindle Locations 1029-1037). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

Where this tends to lead to is to have everyone be dabblers in all religions and devotees to none. Religions then become something like hobbies or lifestyle choices like snowboarding or soccer. For someone to get very serious about soccer and to declare that soccer is true and snowboarders will all go to hell is an assault on the public order. Religious people should be free to pursue their hobby but they must keep it private and should be careful not to make assertions about their religion that might cross someone of another religion. If religious people play by these rules then everything will be fine.

What this position is, however is naive, and exhibits a real lack of understanding about what religious belief is. Religious beliefs order ones world and express the basis of reality for them.

Religious beliefs are similar to cultural beliefs in that they are so deep and so implicit within us that we see the world through them. Try telling someone in our world today that it would be OK for a man to beat his wife if she burned the dinner. For most people in our culture such a statement is unthinkable, it’s just wrong. Well, if you can understand that, you have a sense of what a religion is.

Nicholas Woltersdorff, a nationally recognized philosopher had a good retrospective on 9/11 where he grapples a bit with right and wrong and religious pluralism. He notes correctly that the “all religions are the same” tack really doesn’t pan out. Religions need to tolerate each other and they must look within their own resources to find what they need to live together.

The difficulty in dealing with implicit religions, like moralism, is that tolerance is seen as unnecessary when there is a more obvious solution, seeing like I do. Again, what is naive about this view is that it is really no view at all. It is like a Christian saying “the solution to religious pluralism is that everyone become Christians.” OK, but what you’re really doing is begging the question.

The next question we have is “How can we see religious claims clearly enough to be able to talk about them and even evaluate them?” More on that in the next post.