God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (3 page)

While I do not believe we are not witnessing a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world’s two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap. You would think that champions of multiculturalism would warm to this fact, glorying in the diversity inside and across religious traditions. But even among multiculturalists, the tendency is to pretend that the differences between, say, Christianity and Islam are more apparent than real, and that the differences
inside
religious traditions just don’t warrant the fuss practitioners continue to make over them. Meanwhile, the worldwide Anglican Communion splinters over homosexuality, and in the United States hot-button issues such as abortion and stem-cell research drive Protestants into two opposing camps.

For more than a century, scholars have searched for the essence of religion. They thought they found this holy grail in God, but then they discovered Buddhists and Jains who deny God’s existence. Today it is widely accepted that there is no one essence that all religions share. What they share are family resemblances—tendencies toward this belief or that behavior. In the family of religions, kin tend to perform rituals. They tend to tell stories about how life and death began and to write down these stories in scriptures. They tend to cultivate techniques of ecstasy and devotion. They tend to organize themselves into institutions and to gather in sacred places at sacred times. They tend to instruct human beings how to act toward one another. They tend to profess this belief or that about the gods and the supernatural. They tend to invest objects and places with sacred import. Philosopher of religion Ninian Smart has referred to these tendencies as the seven “dimensions” of religion: the ritual, narrative, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal, and material dimensions.
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These family resemblances are just tendencies, however. Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the men in Michael Jordan’s family was over six feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions. What makes the members of this family different (and themselves) is how they mix and match these dimensions. Experience is central in Daoism and Buddhism. Hinduism and Judaism emphasize the narrative dimension. The ethical dimension is crucial in Confucianism. The Islamic and Yoruba traditions are to a great extent about ritual. And doctrine is particularly important to Christians.

The world’s religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.

Different Problems, Different Goals

After I wrote
Religious Literacy
:
What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t
(2007), I received many letters and emails from readers confessing their ignorance of the world’s religions and asking for a single book they could read to become religiously literate. This book is written for them. It attends to the idiosyncrasies of each of the great religions: for example, Yoruba practitioners’ preoccupation with power, Daoists’ emphasis on naturalness, and Muslims’ attention to the world to come.

At the heart of this project is a simple, four-part approach to the religions, which I have been using for years in the classroom and at lectures around the world. Each religion articulates:

• a
  problem
  ;
  
• a
  solution
  to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal;
  
• a
  technique
  (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and
  
• an
  exemplar
  (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.
  

For example, in Christianity . . .

• the problem is sin;
  
• the solution (or goal) is salvation;
  
• the technique for achieving salvation is some combination of faith and good works; and
  
• the exemplars who chart this path are the saints in Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and ordinary people of faith in Protestantism.
  

And in Buddhism . . .

• the problem is suffering;
  
• the solution (or goal) is nirvana;
  
• the technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold Path, which includes such classic Buddhist practices as meditation and chanting; and
  
• the exemplars who chart this path are
  arhats
  (for Theravada Buddhists),
  bodhisattvas
  (for Mahayana Buddhists), or
  lamas
  (for Vajrayana Buddhists).
  

This four-step approach is admittedly simplistic. You cannot sum up thousands of years of Christian faith or Buddhist practice in four sentences. So this model is just a starting point and must be nuanced along the way. For example, Roman Catholics and Protestants are divided about how to achieve salvation, just as Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists are divided about how to achieve nirvana (or whether nirvana is an “achievement” at all). One of the virtues of this simple scheme, however, is that it helps to make plain the
differences
across and inside the religious traditions. Are Buddhists trying to achieve salvation? Of course not, since they don’t even believe in sin. Are Christians trying to achieve nirvana? No, since for them suffering isn’t something that must be overcome. In fact, it might even be a good thing.

This book is addressed to both religious and nonreligious people. You don’t have to believe in God to want to understand how beliefs in God have transformed individuals and societies from ancient Israel to contemporary China. And you don’t have to be baptized into Christianity or married to a Muslim to want to understand the work that rituals do to the people who undergo and administer them. So this book is written for nonbelievers. But it is written for practitioners too, and for seekers on sacred journeys of their own. The spiritually curious searching for new questions or new answers will find plenty of both in the lives of the Hindus, Confucians, and Jews explored in this book. And even those who are settled in their religious (or nonreligious) ways should find opportunities to reimagine their religious commitments (or lack thereof) by comparing and contrasting them with different ways of being religious.

Much is missing here. Shinto is not covered. Neither is Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Wicca, or the Baha’i faith. Also neglected are new religious movements such as Rastafarianism and Scientology. But the religion I most regret excluding is Sikhism. I am the adviser to Boston University’s Sikh Association, and some of my best students have been Sikhs. I had to draw the line somewhere, however, and I drew it on this side of the world’s 25 million or so practitioners of Sikhism.

Included in this book are the great religions of the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), India (Hinduism and Buddhism), and East Asia (Confucianism and Daoism). Also included is the Yoruba religion of West Africa and its diasporas. In textbooks on the world’s religions, this tradition is often lumped in with Native American, Australian, and other African “primitive” or “primal” religions. But Yoruba religion is a great religion, too, claiming perhaps 100 million adherents and spanning the globe from its homeland in West Africa to South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Although these religions appear here in discreet chapters, none really stands alone. As Confucians are quick to remind us, no human being is an island, and as Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel once wrote, “No religion is an island” either.
¹⁴
One of the great themes of world history is interreligious contact, and interreligious conflict, collaboration, and combination have only accelerated in recent times. So this book aims to present the eight great religions not in isolation but in contact, and comparison. You can learn a lot about your own religion by comparing it with others. As the German philologist and comparative religionist Max Müller famously put it, “He who knows one, knows none.”
¹⁵

Great Is Not Necessarily Good

Muslims have long insisted that only God is great. Still, this book refers to the world’s major religions as great. What does this mean? First, it does not mean that they are good. For more than a generation, writers on religion have acted on the conviction that the way toward interreligious understanding was to emphasize not only the similarities of the world’s religions but also their essential goodness. This impulse is understandable. No fair-minded scholar wants to perpetuate stereotypes, often rooted in missionary polemics, about Islam as sexist, Hinduism as idol obsessed, or African religions as satanic. But it is time to grow out of this reflex to defend. After 9/11 and the Holocaust, we need to see the world’s religions as they really are—in all their gore and glory. This includes seeing where they agree and disagree, and not turning a blind eye to their failings.

Since 1927,
Time
magazine has named a person of the year. Some of these men and women—Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill come to mind—have been great in the sense of good. But goodness has not been a requirement for
Time
’s editors, who try simply to identify the person who, “for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year.” (Hitler was
Time
’s choice in 1938, and Stalin in 1939 and 1942.) In selecting the religions for this book, I have not made any effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have simply tried to include religions that are both widespread and weighty—religions that “for better or worse” have been particularly influential over time and continue to influence us today.
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The world’s religions appear here not in chronological order of their founding but in order of influence—from the most to the least great. But how do you determine greatness? Statistics obviously matter. Strictly by the numbers, Christianity and Islam, which together account for over half of the world’s population, are the greatest; Judaism, with a mere 14 million adherents, is in last place by far. But another key factor is historical significance. On this score Judaism may well be the greatest, since it gave birth to both Christianity and Islam. In the end, however, the rankings presented here focus first and foremost on contemporary impact—to what extent each religion moves us and shakes us and sends us scrambling after words.

While researching this book, I asked friends and students which religion they thought was the most influential. I got back a litany of possibilities, including communism. A strong case was made for Confucianism, which has been a prime mover behind the East Asian economic miracle of the last generation and is booming in China now that the government is promoting Confucian ideals as a supplement to (and a possible replacement for) dying Marxist and Leninist ideology. But Christianity and Islam are the two greatest religions today. They are the traditions that draw the atheists’ ire. And they are the ones that are redrawing the geopolitical map.

The Greatest Religion

The case for Christianity’s preeminence is compelling. In the United States, the most powerful country in the world, Christianity is the religion
par excellence
. The world’s number one bestseller, the Bible, is the scripture of American politics, widely quoted in inaugural addresses and on the floor of the House and Senate. And the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens call themselves Christians, as has every U.S. president from Washington on. In the wider world, however, there is no majority religion. In fact, no one religion claims more than a third of what is an intensely competitive global religious marketplace. So worldwide the question of greatness is not so cut-and-dried.

Nonetheless, Islam is the Muhammad Ali of the world’s religions. Statistically, it is second to Christianity, but its numbers are growing far more rapidly. Over the last century, the Christian portion of the world’s population has declined slightly—from 35 percent in 1900 to 33 percent today. And in Europe many of these Christians are nominal practitioners at best. Over this same period, Islam’s numbers have skyrocketed—from 12 percent of the world’s population in 1900 to 22 percent today.
¹⁷
According to the World Religion Database, Islam is growing 33 percent faster than is Christianity, largely thanks to high birth rates in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Iran, and other countries where Islam predominates.
¹⁸
So while Christianity’s market share has stalled, Islam’s is racing ahead at a breakneck pace.

Numbers aside, Islam is the leader of the pack in terms of contemporary impact. Many Christians render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, restricting their faith to the private realm. Muslims, by contrast, have never accepted this /files/03/51/07/f035107/public/private distinction. Most see Islam as both a religion and a way of life. This way of life affects how they dress, what they eat, and how they invest, spend, and lend money. So the religious commitments of Muslims have a huge impact on the world around them.

Islam and Christianity are both missionary religions that have been competing for converts since the birth of Islam in the seventh century. As the modern age opened, Islam was ascendant, taking Constantinople in 1453 and rapidly expanding over the next few centuries across Europe and the Middle East into North Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Over the last few centuries, however, and especially since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Christianity has been ascendant, thanks to the economic, technological, and military might of the colonial powers of Europe and the United States. In today’s postcolonial era, Muslims are again on the march, and in the news. In a world in which oil runs our cars, power plants, and (increasingly) our lives, the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Islamic nations hold extraordinary influence. Almost all of the world’s political hot spots involve Muslims in some way. Finally, the impact that Islamic extremists in al-Qaeda and other jihadist organizations have had on contemporary life is incalculable. Their actions have redirected trillions of dollars in government budgets and transformed not only how we travel and wage war but also how we imagine the future of the planet. Islam, in short, is the globe’s most-talked-about religion. It is no accident that journalist Christopher Hitchens has aimed his poison pen first and foremost at Islam. “
Allahu Akbar
,” say the Muslim faithful: “God is great.” “God is not great,” says Hitchens. “Religion poisons everything.”
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