Not all decisions are created equal. What color t-shirt I wear on a lazy Saturday morning carries much less weight than the decision to get married, choose a career, buy a house, or have a child. There is a hierarchy of significance to decisions based on ramifications: how many people are affected? for how long? to what degree?
Religious pluralism, in its' eagerness to affirm and celebrate all cultures and religious traditions, has had this unintended consequence: what in actuality are ultimate decisions of infinite consequence about the purpose and meaning behind the universe have been neutered.
If any and all decisions are the same, then no decision makes any difference whatsoever. If all faith decisions are equal and none is any better or more fitting than any other, then questions about ultimate reality have essentially been taken out of the category of 'utmost importance' and relegated to the same category as my Saturday morning t-shirt decision. What pluralism intended to do was celebrate and affirm. What it has actually done is gut and dismember.
This has the unintended but very real consequence of creating a new religion, the religion of the future: apathy-ism.
I was talking with a dad yesterday who works with his kids' youth group. His biggest challenge? To get the kids to care. If none of this matters and any faith decision is as good as any other, just find whatever works for you. Don't bother with whether or not it has any external value or good. Never mind if it's true or real--and please don't get overly worked up about it. As pluralism continues to filter down to the pop-culture level, apathy-ism grows and will continue to grow like kudzu. Even in the church.
Let me hasten to add here that I think that pluralism is necessary in our society. I'm not sure that there's any other way that we can function as a nation with people from every part of the globe apart from it. At many points it serves all of us well. But it's essential that we understand its' holes and fallacies in order that we combat those with all diligence and wisdom. And when it comes to matters of ultimate importance, pluralism fails us all miserably.
In our society every decision is valued only insofar as I can have 'freedom' to dispose of it quickly and easily: Don't like your spouse? Get a new one! In our cultural hierarchy of choices, we have managed to turn things upside down: what is important has become trivialized and what is trivial has been elevated. And the results are disastrous.
In this sense I have more in common as a committed Christian with a Muslim who believes vehemently that as a Christian I am doomed to destruction, than I do with the liberal Christian who thinks that we're all worshipping the same God. The Muslim and I both have one thing in common: we both think that what we believe matters. And that, as common-sense as it would seem, is something that has gotten lost in our current confusion.
2 comments:
I agree with your assessment of Pluralism leading to apathy in general.
In regards to the high-school kids, though, my guess is that even more than pluralism, the culture-of-cool and the culture-of-irony have more to do with their disinterest in things permanent and momentous.
The culture of cool raises indifference as the highest value. "You can't faze me! I'm cool."
The culture of irony is a culture of witty cynicism and sometimes just cynicism. Cynicism is the antithesis of hope. And Hope is one of three key ingredients to Life in Christ (the others being . . .
wait for it . . .
Faith & Love).
We live in a world where we're told:
1 - making decisions is not cool, because it means you care about something.
2 - even if you were to care enough to make decisions, you're damned regardless of what you choose, as nothing is what it seems, and nobody lives up to their promises. (Though please be witty in your despair. Thanks.)
3 - should you care enough to choose, and decide that religious choices might have some meaning after all, it still doesn't matter what you choose, as they all mean the same thing anyway.
Thank you. :-)
I hope you don't mind i re-posted that (credited to you, with a link to your blog) in my journal. hopefully that last part about liberal Christians will reach a particular friend of mine who doesn't see a difference between our beliefs. And it's convicting on a level too, because if "liberal" christians omit parts of the Bible, it can (and should) cause "committed" Christians to reevaluate how fully committed to the Truth they really are. What good are we to weak believers if we ourselves are weak?
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