Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd and Professor Stephen Prothero discuss challenges to common views about religious diversity.

Do religions essentially represent many paths up the same mountain? In recent decades, many religious leaders have encouraged people of faith to look for the things that major religions have in common: a commitment to help the poor, for example. The discovery of common ground has encouraged tolerance and respect and has helped people to work across religious and cultural lines to combat malaria and improve education.

Prothero thinks, however, that something is missing when we look only at common ground. “The way forward for interreligious dialog isn’t by pretending that all religions are the same, but by grappling with the differences,” Prothero asserts. Tolerance or even respect “isn’t really grounded unless it’s grounded in the reality of the differences as well as the similarities of the world’s religions.”

The search for common ground has been encouraged in part from a fear of conflict and even war, according to Prothero. He maintains, however, that “it’s possible to have difference without conflict.”

Prothero goes one step further in encouraging the study of different religions. Each religion has unique beauty, contributions, and insights. We can study other religions just because they are intriguing and we might learn something about others—and even ourselves.

“People disagree about the most basic things, like how many gods are there?” Prothero says. “Some say zero, and they’re religious: Buddhists and Confucians. Some say one: the Abrahamic religions. Some say more than one: Hindus classically have said that, although … most American Hindus are also monotheists.”

Each major religion has its own way of defining problems, solutions, and the path from problem to solution. Prothero gives basic examples from the three Abrahamic religions. Christianity underscores the problem of sin, so hard to eradicate that God had to take on human form and die on the cross. Christians emphasize heaven and life after death (and might be surprised to learn that non-Christians wonder about that preoccupation). Judaism focuses on human exile from one another and from God, and tries to work out ways to return to God; law and storytelling are central to Jewish practice. Islam takes on problems that arise from excessive pride and self-sufficiency, underscoring the need to submit to God and practice the austerities of the faith.

Of course, religions also have difficult teachings. The Bible, Quran, and other sacred texts have passages that seem to extol violence. Sympathizers may be tempted to pretend that the passages do not exist. Opponents might seize on passages to discredit a religion. Prothero recommends a third approach: find out what these passages mean to each religion’s adherents, in the full context of their tradition.

While admitting discomfort with the Quran’s passages about hell and fighting for the tradition, Prothero makes another point. Christianity started as a pacifist tradition, in his view. Centuries after Jesus’ death, the Roman Catholic Church saw reason to develop a theory of just war. Islam, by contrast, had a theory of just war from its earliest days, with rules against killing noncombatants and destroying property. “I can see the good and the bad of each of those traditions,” Prothero summarizes.

About Stephen Prothero

Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University specializing in American religions. He received his BA from Yale College in American Studies and his MA and Ph.D. from Harvard University in the Study of Religion.

A historian of American religions, Prothero has written six books, including The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott, which won the Best First Book award of the American Academy of Religion in 1997, and American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, which was named one of the top religion books for 2003 by Publishers Weekly. His two most recent projects are the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t and God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter.

In addition to his scholarly work, which includes peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Prothero has written for a variety of popular magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. He has commented on religion on NPR and on such television programs as The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The O’Reilly Factor, and The Today Show. He is also a regular contributor to CNN’s Belief Blog.