This morning I was listening to NPR on the way to work, like I usually do. They featured a story called “Experiencing Other Faiths to Find Your Own,” about a girl from Davidson College (NC) who took a year to travel abroad and explore other ways of looking at religion.

With a small group of students, Gillian Siple, a religion major, lived in China, Thailand and India. She meditated in monasteries and ashrams, lived and studied among Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus — not your typical study-abroad program.

She remembers living at a meditation center in Thailand, wearing the traditional garb of a yogi. “I remember waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning and taking out my mat and I can remember just thinking, ‘What if my friends saw me now? Would anyone recognize me? I am so far from the person and the life that I live back at Davidson right now. There’s no remnant of that life on my body right now.’”

Even her faith began to fall away. She says that when she mediated, she felt an uncommon sense of peace. She wondered: Have I gone into this too deeply? Am I still a Christian, or am I becoming something else?

She said she now calls herself a “Christian Pluralist,” meaning that she is open to the validity of other religions. I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s actually possible. A Christian is someone who follows Christ and His teachings. One of those teachings, very clearly put by Him, was that there IS no other way.

  • John 14:6 says: “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
  • Acts 4:12 says: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

True Christianity has no allowance for other religions being “correct.” Granted, nobody should be forced to believe anything and everyone should be allowed to believe whatever they want and follow whatever religion they choose, but that does not make everyone right. There’s a big difference between allowing everyone to believe what they want and endorsing what everyone believes.

“Christian Pluralism,” then, is really an oxymoron. You can’t have both with integrity; one or the other must be compromised to be held to by one person. From this story, it sounds like Gillian has compromised her Christianity for the sake of Pluralism.

But that’s not really a surprise. When listening to her tell her story, I was struck by the feelings she expressed about when she was on this trip and tried to reconnect to her Christian God. She went into her room and knelt and tried to pray. She got as far as “Dear God…” and no words would come. I think that was when she said she began wondering what she was becoming if she couldn’t pray to this God that she no longer knew.

My thought: If you immerse yourself in error, of COURSE you will lose connection with the Truth. Investigating and learning are good, and learning about other religions can help you appreciate your own faith, but becoming steeped in the ways of error will not help you learn the Truth. Maybe it’s the difference between intellectually learning something and becoming personally involved, making it part of you.

This isn’t a popular concept nowadays, but it needs to be said. People today want to hear that anything is legitimate and valid as long as it is believed with sincerity. It makes people feel better about themselves and it soothes the guilty heart to be told that there are no absolutes. What counts is being nice to people and keeping your religion to yourself. They say there’s no such thing today as being wrong in the area of religion. But true Christianity (and true Islam and several others) teaches that there IS such a thing as right and wrong and that following other religions is error. There is no reconciliation there. Apart from dialogue, whose purpose is basically to encourage civility, but not necessarily acceptance.

My thought: If God came down to earth and told us what was right and wrong and what to believe and how to live, it would become our obligation to follow Him. (And you know what? That HAPPENED!)

Be sure to visit the NPR page itself to read the whole article that prompted this post. You can even click the “Listen” button at the top and hear the story just like it was broadcast this morning.

[tags]religion, Christianity, pluralism, NPR[/tags]