Unfortunately, it’s been a busy month. I checked out Robert Wuthnow’s “America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity,” then renewed it for two weeks, and I still haven’t finished it. What’s worse, I have to read another book for a story for the newspaper, and so Wuthnow is going back to the library tomorrow. I will probably check him back out at some point; I owe him that much.

This is a function of my life, not Wuthnow’s book, which is excellent. The book is an exploration, based on an extensive survey, of Christians’ attitudes (or, at least, the attitudes of persons coming from a Christian background) towards other religions and what that says about the future of our society.

Wuthnow breaks down the survey respondents into three groups:

• “Spiritual shoppers” believe in the validity of many different religious traditions and pick and choose elements of each.
• “Christian inclusivists” are people who are dedicated to major aspects of Christian faith and practice in their own lives but who are open-minded about the validity of other religions and/or the eternal fate of their practitioners.
• “Christian exclusivists” are those who believe that Christianity is the one true faith and that those who reject it are doomed to eternal punishment.

Wuthnow actually does a pretty fair job of pointing out some of the internal contradictions and problems with each approach. For example, most “Christian exclusivists” do very little about sharing their faith on a regular basis, even though they (we, although that may be an oversimplification of my position) claim to believe that that the stakes of such evangelism are high.

I have skipped past some of the statistical analysis to the climactic chapter, “How Pluralistic Should We Be?”

Wuthnow takes seriously, and pays attention to, the tension that I mentioned in some of the early posts here. How do we create a culture of pluralism, respect and dialogue without trying to equate all religions in a universalism that renders them all equally meaningless? I do not agree with all of his conclusions, and doubt he would agree with all of mine, but this is a remarkable book which asks probing, important and uncomfortable questions. Serious and recommended reading for any Christian.