All Religions are not the Same

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. And as someone who comes from what many would call a more “progressive” expression of Christianity, I know the assumption that sometimes gets made: “Oh, he must think all religions are basically interchangeable.” But that’s just not true. I cherish interreligious dialogue. I value the deep wisdom found in many traditions. I believe we need partnerships across faith lines to meet the challenges of our world. Yet I am a Christian by choice. I’ve chosen this particular path of following Jesus because it is the story, the way of understanding God, that to me makes the most sense and, when followed faithfully, I believe connects me most deeply to the divine and my neighbor. So, this week switch things up a bit by breaking the progressive myth that all religions are basically the same. The idea that all religions are “basically the same” usually comes from the outside, from people who haven’t actually lived inside these traditions. From afar, you can see some common moral themes—compassion, justice, humility, generosity—and those similarities matter. They point to the ways human beings across cultures have intuited the sacred, sought connection with the divine, and tried to shape a meaningful life. But once you step into the interior logic of each religion, you realize they are not interchangeable. They have profoundly different understandings of God, the human person, salvation, liberation, suffering, the meaning of history—just to name a few. One of the best resources for thinking about this is the theologian S. Mark Heim, particularly his book The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Heim argues something far more interesting than the simple “all religions are one” or the harsh “only one religion has truth.” He says religions actually aim at different spiritual ends—not different paths up the same mountain, but different mountains altogether. What I appreciate about Heim is that he takes other religions seriously. He doesn’t flatten them into carbon copies of Christianity. He listens to them long enough to understand that they have their own goals, their own visions of fulfillment, and their own experiences of the divine. For example, the Christian understanding of salvation is not merely enlightenment or moral improvement or escape from suffering. It’s participation in the life of the Triune God—what the Eastern Orthodox call theosis, the Roman Catholics all the Beatific Vision, and most other Christian traditions simply call heaven. This is our full our union with God in Christ through the Spirit and it is inseparable from entering into perfect love of neighbor. That is a unique claim. Likewise, Buddhism’s aim of liberation from suffering by overcoming attachment is not the same thing as Christian salvation. Christianity doesn’t seek the elimination of desire or attachment, but their transformation—inviting us to attach ourselves ever more deeply and faithfully to God and neighbor, and to discover in suffering not quite a problem to be escaped but a place where God, in Christ, has chosen to dwell with us. The truth is, when we say, “All religions are the same,” we’re not actually honoring these traditions. We’re erasing them. We’re implicitly silencing their distinct voices, their unique treasures, their hard-won wisdom. A better approach—and the one I try to take as a Christian—is to say: All religions are not the same, but many religions contain truth, goodness, and beauty. And Christians are called to listen and learn without surrendering the particularity of our own story. For me, following Jesus is not about believing my religion is the only container that holds truth. I can find echoes of Christian truth in the insights of other religions just as much as their distinctive approaches to God and the world can help me be curious about my own faith commitments. To be a Christian is about affirming that Christianity is the story I trust with my life—the story of a God who enters human vulnerability, who refuses to meet violence with violence, who rises from death not with vengeance but with peace, and who draws all creation toward reconciliation and renewal. That is the story that claims me even as I claim it. That’s why I’m a Christian—not by inertia or accident, but by discernment, because this is the path where I have found God. Interfaith partnership does not require pretending that deep differences don’t exist. And it doesn’t require us to collapse everything into one bland universalism. Genuine dialogue happens when we’re honest about who we are, when we can admire the gifts of another tradition while still affirming our own convictions, and when we recognize that God is bigger than any single religion’s imagination—even our own. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.