Part of the difficulty of evaluating other religious traditions is that we can’t help but evaluate them through the lens of our own religious tradition. We have no “objective” platform outside of ourselves, our histories and our perspectives from which to evaluate.

In a previous blog post I noted that what I call Moralism acts as a sort of covert, default religion within our culture (and others).  A good example of this came in the Yoga discussion. When I questioned whether yoga could be used as an avenue for Christian discipleship one response I got was “are you saying people who do yoga are ‘bad’ people and are going to hell?!” This is a pretty blatant assumption of a moralistic worldview in evaluating a claim.

Listen carefully to the American public media handle religious material. Two assumptions universally beneath the surface appear quickly:

1. Religion is supposed to help people experience “a better life” (the therapeutic aspect)

2. Religion determines whether people go to heaven or hell.

A few years ago there was an ABC News special on the subject that you can still find on the web but only in a short summary format. The treatment exemplifies how we as a culture are attempting to navigate the difficult challenge of religious pluralism.

The treatment first begins by noting some differences between religions but then implicitly assuming a sort of “least common denominator” reality. The terms it finally adopts for this “least common denominator” approach are ones that Christians (the tradition most of their audience likely can relate to) would be familiar with. The program runs into trouble even with this strategy when it becomes very clear that different traditions have very different notions of an after-life if they have one at all.

Where the conversation usually goes from here is likely wise predictable. It often goes in both of these directions.

Either we highlight the differences “Christians say Christians go to heaven and Muslims to hell. Muslims say Muslims go to heaven and Christians to hell.” Pluralism then becomes an occasion for skepticism about religion in general.

The other route is to try to downplay the conflict and have an implicit system relativize the competing systems. That is usually where moralism comes in handy. “Christians and Muslims disagree, but I think we can say that God will reward the good people for meaning well or at least trying. If there are people bad enough that in our opinion will warrant condemnation God will take care of that too or maybe just evaporate them quickly so they won’t suffer, like the dogs at the pound.”

It’s easy to see how Christian Smith’s “Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism” then comes to expression. We can’t be sure about afterlife (or before life) convictions so we’ll focus on the therapeutic and the morality of our present existence and be skeptical about what we can’t demonstrate.

Here’s the problem with that. This “solution” really only begs the question because to evaluate the therapeutic and the moral you need the rest of the religious perspective. We tend to have an a-historical, pragmatic view of reality and an assumption that we see it all clearly. We know the good because the good is obvious. (Again, see the quote from Souls in Transition.”)

When confronted with the fact that our notions of the therapeutic and moral have varied greatly throughout history (something that perhaps should incite a bit of skepticism with respect to our presumed internal moral compass) we invoke a narrative of moral, social evolution presuming that now finally today we have finally arrived at the true knowledge of what is right, what is good, and what brings health to individuals and community.

The irony of course is that differences in these matters are at least as broad and conflictive as religious differences especially if you get out of your own cultural groupings.

The end is a society that is religiously impoverished according to anyone’s standard. Many people have little idea what they actually believe beyond an instinctive response to situational episodes groomed by hours of social and media experiences. In short, it’s easy to see why we find what we see described in Christian Smith’s books on religion in society.

The promised eclipse of religion by the supposedly “scientific” or “modern” humanity has proven as empty as Harold Camping’s raptures. Despite the moralizing of the New Atheists the nihilism of their hollow materialism doesn’t feed the meaning hungry human heart. The general skepticism that gives rise to the New Atheists, however, tends to keep all religious participation tentative and pragmatic.  Religious pluralism undermines all religions to the degree that many in society assume a fence sitting posture, ready to hop off if that particular fence “no longer works for me.”

At the same time it forces others to abandon public religion for private ones that resist public truth. You can see this in fundamentalisms of various stripes as well as in the popularity of traditions that profess the public world to be illusory. Retreating into the Bible at the expense of engagement with public history and science is not that far removed from working hard to resist appearances in an attempt to see all existence as emanations of the divine (pantheism and panentheism)(then again many won’t even know those words.)

A great irony of our present age is of course the fact that  we have more information at our disposal and are less capable of using it productively. No where is this more true than in the area of religion.