Within various forms of religious relativism, there is a not-so-hidden soft totalitarianism that is swiftly moving into “harder” versions with devastating real-life consequences for anyone who dares to openly resist it.
Way back in olden times, when I was still a professor of theology, one of the most ubiquitous attitudes amongst the students was that it does not matter which religion one practiced since “all religions are really saying the same thing in their essence”.
Indeed, in this view, it does not even matter if one practices a religion at all since it is possible to be a “good person” and to be “spiritual” without any religious affiliation. Furthermore, such views are expressed with extreme confidence, as if there is no need to offer arguments for them since their reasonableness is beyond dispute.
I will forgo a lengthy critique of these views since their many flaws defy easy encapsulation. Suffice it to say that ignored in all of this is the fact that the notion that “all religions are essentially the same” is itself, as we see in a variety of new ersatz spiritualities, a highly particular and disputable, theological claim about the alleged reality of a universally shared “inner religious experience” that is pre-linguistic and ineffable.
Whenever a student would raise this relativist view, rather than attempt to dispute the claim directly, I would ask them to explain to me—since they seem to be so knowledgeable about the nature of “religion”—the basic beliefs of various religions. And of course, they could not do so. Invariably, they would deflect the query by insinuating that there is no need to know what the various religions teach since such teachings are mere window dressing on the deeper truths of religious experience. But, when pressed further to explain what they mean by “religious experience,” they were equally vague and could only offer up shallow philosophical and mostly therapeutic understandings that reduced to simple nostrums such as “being true to yourself.”
My conclusion was that those who hold such opinions view the various religions as “equal” in the sense that they are all equally trivial and not really worth studying in a granular way. And the assertion of their putative triviality is grounded in an antecedent commitment to a different set of “dogmas” concerning the moral and intellectual superiority of a radical egalitarianism in all matters of religion. There is also an antecedent and undeveloped assumption as to what a “religion” is in the first place, which is, of course, no easy thing to define.
What one soon discovers in such classroom conversations is that this relativistic view of religion cannot be countered with any kind of argumentation, such as above, no matter how cogent such argumentation might be. This is because the faulty view is expressive of a generalized cultural ethos. It is like an invasive fog in a bad horror novel, the fruit of centuries of marginalization and then compartmentalization of Christianity in particular, but also of all other religions as well. This, in turn, led to the Church becoming a rather extrinsic existential reality—just one lifestyle accessory among many.
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