but the pulse I got was like, exclusivism is waning, it’s losing popularity very fast, and pluralism is on the rise.
My read, from my very limited perspective mostly engaging with new-age folks, and my serious-Christian highschool peers, as a teenager, is that this is mostly a response to increased secularism and waning traditional religious influence.
Enlightenment, post-Westphalian norms are very heavy on freedom of religion. As the influence of religions has waned, and societal mores have come to rest more and more on the secular morality. As an example, compare how in the 1950s, the question of whether someone “a good person” was loaded on whether they were an upstanding christian, and in 2010, the question of whether someone is “a good person” is much more highly loaded on whether they’re racist.
In that process, insisting on religious exclusivism has become kind of goshe—it makes you seem like a backwards, bigoted, not-very cosmopolitan, person.
So how can religions respond? They can double down on calling out how mainstream society is sinful and try to fight the culture war. Or they can get with the program, and become hip and liberal, which means being accepting of other religions, to the point of saying that they’re all paths up the same mountain, in defiance of centuries of doctrine and literal bloody violence.
And in practice, different religious communities have taken either one or some combination of these paths.
But this doesn’t represent an awakening to the underlying metaphysical truth underlying all religions (which again, I’m much more sympathetic to than many). It mostly represents, religious institutions adapting to the pressures of modernity and secularism.
It looks to me like mostly a watering down of religion, rather than an expression of some deep spiritual impulse.
It’s basically the same situation as regards doctrine on evolution by natural selection. The church fought that one, tooth and nail, for centuries, declaring that it was an outright. But secular culture eventually (mostly) beat the church in that culture war, and only now, to stay relevant, does the church backslide putting forward much weaker versions of their earlier position, whereby evolution is real, but compatible with divine creation. It’s confused to look at that situation and attribute it to the Church’s orientation to religion, all along, being more correct than we gave it credit for.
And the sociology matters here because makes different predictions about what will accelerate and increase this trend. If I’m correct, and this shift is mostly downstream of religions losing their influence, compared broader secular mores and values, then we won’t get more of it by increasing the importance, salience, of religion.
Granted, I’ll give you that much of the world is still religious, and maybe the best way to bridge to them to produce the transformations the world needs, is through their religion. But I think you’re overstating how much religious pluralism is a force on the rise, as opposed to a kind of weak-sauce reaction to external forces.
And FWIW, there’s something cruxy for me here. I would be more interested in religions if I thought that there was a positive rising force of religious pluralism (especially one that was grounded in the mystical traditions of the various religions), instead of reactive one.
My read, from my very limited perspective mostly engaging with new-age folks, and my serious-Christian highschool peers, as a teenager, is that this is mostly a response to increased secularism and waning traditional religious influence.
Enlightenment, post-Westphalian norms are very heavy on freedom of religion. As the influence of religions has waned, and societal mores have come to rest more and more on the secular morality. As an example, compare how in the 1950s, the question of whether someone “a good person” was loaded on whether they were an upstanding christian, and in 2010, the question of whether someone is “a good person” is much more highly loaded on whether they’re racist.
In that process, insisting on religious exclusivism has become kind of goshe—it makes you seem like a backwards, bigoted, not-very cosmopolitan, person.
So how can religions respond? They can double down on calling out how mainstream society is sinful and try to fight the culture war. Or they can get with the program, and become hip and liberal, which means being accepting of other religions, to the point of saying that they’re all paths up the same mountain, in defiance of centuries of doctrine and literal bloody violence.
And in practice, different religious communities have taken either one or some combination of these paths.
But this doesn’t represent an awakening to the underlying metaphysical truth underlying all religions (which again, I’m much more sympathetic to than many). It mostly represents, religious institutions adapting to the pressures of modernity and secularism.
It looks to me like mostly a watering down of religion, rather than an expression of some deep spiritual impulse.
It’s basically the same situation as regards doctrine on evolution by natural selection. The church fought that one, tooth and nail, for centuries, declaring that it was an outright. But secular culture eventually (mostly) beat the church in that culture war, and only now, to stay relevant, does the church backslide putting forward much weaker versions of their earlier position, whereby evolution is real, but compatible with divine creation. It’s confused to look at that situation and attribute it to the Church’s orientation to religion, all along, being more correct than we gave it credit for.
And the sociology matters here because makes different predictions about what will accelerate and increase this trend. If I’m correct, and this shift is mostly downstream of religions losing their influence, compared broader secular mores and values, then we won’t get more of it by increasing the importance, salience, of religion.
Granted, I’ll give you that much of the world is still religious, and maybe the best way to bridge to them to produce the transformations the world needs, is through their religion. But I think you’re overstating how much religious pluralism is a force on the rise, as opposed to a kind of weak-sauce reaction to external forces.
And FWIW, there’s something cruxy for me here. I would be more interested in religions if I thought that there was a positive rising force of religious pluralism (especially one that was grounded in the mystical traditions of the various religions), instead of reactive one.