Learn from One Another's Faiths

Growing up in Southwest Michigan, I was never much exposed to religious views that differed, let alone that may have contradicted, those of my own. My mother raised me best she could as a good Christian boy, and aside from an occasional Catholic acquaintance in grade school, that was the only faith I'd ever known until my teenage years. At that point my religious exposure still hadn't diversified much, it was just that instead of meeting people with differing convictions I realized that most of the people I had contact with had no real religious convictions at all. The most interesting person of faith I met in my early teens was a girl who claimed to be "Agnostic, or maybe Atheist, I don't remember."

Being one of the very few people, I thought at the time, of my age in the entire United States who actually had a desire not only to believe, but to practice my faith, I had a hard time holding on to any real friends. It was hard to feel like the only person in high school who wouldn't go to parties and get wasted because you'd made sure everyone knew it was against your religion. It didn't take long for people to simply not ask me to do things. And it wasn't just the other kids my age. I started noticing the adults around me, those I went to church with, parents of my friends from youth group (who themselves never thought twice about attending the aforementioned parties) were divorced, or in the process of getting divorced. I started to notice all their nice clothes, their nice cars, the way they looked at me in my thrift-store hand-me-downs when I came over to see their sons or daughters. I began to question how all their actions could be justified when I compared them to what I'd read in the Bible. Wasn't divorce wrong? What about being so wealthy, didn't the Bible condemn wealth, and honor the poor?

I graduated high school, where I'd always had the plan of attending a nice Christian college and becoming a youth pastor somewhere, extremely down and disillusioned with my faith. I didn't go to a Christian college (I couldn't afford it), and thought about calling it quits altogether. I realized that my lack of exposure to other views and religious convictions had been a huge personal loss; it had made me ignorant to the ways of the world, intolerant of the fact that other people may simply not believe the same things as me.

Rather than give up on my faith completely, I decided to do some research. I spent the next several years, and continue to this day, studying the major texts of other faiths, trying to understand our differences, and more importantly, our similarities. I'd been raised by the church to believe that "our truth" was the one and only Truth, and that other religions were not only wrong, but sinful. What I've found out throughout my studies is that the Christianity I was born into and many other major world religions, particularly those of Eastern descent, are not all that dissimilar. In fact, it's entirely possible that a pastor at any given Christian church on any given Sunday could stand up and read from the Tao or the Hindu Upanishads, simply exchanging the terms "Self" and "Brahmin" for "God" or "Jesus," and the larger portion of those in the congregation would have no idea he was not reading from the Christian Bible.

It is true that there are differences in certain doctrines of our faiths, but many of these can be wiped away with the understanding that many of the religious terms we use in our respective religions are simply different names for the same thing. God is still God by any other name. If our American culture, even a small portion of it, could come to some understanding of this, if we could learn to not only tolerate each other but to actually learn from one another, our world would be a much better place.