What Is Religious Pluralism?

The Triad: Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism

When the world's religions make conflicting claims — Christianity says Jesus is God, Islam says God has no partners, Buddhism says the self is an illusion, Hinduism says the self is identical with Brahman — how should we respond? The philosophy of religion has mapped three main answers, and the triad is now standard.

Exclusivism holds that one religion is true and the others are, where they disagree, false. The Christian exclusivist says Christianity is true and Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are mistaken insofar as they contradict it. The Muslim exclusivist says the same from the other direction. Exclusivism sounds harsh to modern ears, but it is the default position of most of the world's religious traditions through most of their history. If you believe your religion is true, and if your religion claims to be the unique path to God, then you are an exclusivist whether you like the label or not.

Inclusivism holds that one religion is true, but that other religions contain genuine truth and can be paths to salvation. The inclusivist does not abandon the claim that their religion is the fullest or truest. They soften it by saying that God's grace can work through other traditions, that other religions contain real revelation, and that their adherents can be saved through them. Karl Rahner is the paradigmatic Catholic inclusivist, with his concept of the "anonymous Christian" — the person who, through no fault of their own, has not heard the gospel but lives by the grace that Christ makes available to all. Inclusivism is a middle position: one religion is privileged, but the others are not simply false.

Pluralism holds that multiple religions are valid paths to the same ultimate reality. The pluralist does not privilege one tradition. They say that the world's religions are different human responses to the same divine reality, different cultural expressions of the same encounter, different paths up the same mountain. The most influential pluralist theory is John Hick's, and it is worth examining in detail.

Hick's Pluralist Hypothesis

John Hick, in An Interpretation of Religion (1989), built his pluralist hypothesis on two foundations: a Kantian epistemology and a phenomenology of religious experience.

The Kantian foundation is the distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-experienced. Kant argued that we never encounter reality as it is in itself; we encounter it filtered through the categories of our mind. Hick applied this to religion. The ultimate reality — which he called the "Real an sich," borrowing Kant's term — is beyond the reach of any human conceptual scheme. What we encounter are the phenomenal forms of the Real: the God of Christianity, the Allah of Islam, the Brahman of Hinduism, the Dharmakaya of Buddhism. These are not hallucinations or projections. They are genuine experiences of the Real, but they are shaped by the cultural and conceptual categories of the experiencer. The Christian encounters the Real as a personal God. The Buddhist encounters it as non-personal, as sunyata (emptiness). Both are real experiences; both are culturally conditioned responses to the same underlying reality.

The phenomenological foundation is the observation that the major world religions produce remarkably similar fruits. William James noted this in The Varieties of Religious Experience: across traditions, the fruits of religious experience — moral transformation, compassion, detachment from selfishness, a sense of the sacred — are strikingly similar. Hick made this the empirical basis of pluralism. If the fruits are the same, and if the experiences are genuine, then the different traditions are responding to the same reality in different ways. The mountain has many paths.

Hick's hypothesis has an elegant parsimony. It respects the integrity of all the major traditions without reducing them to one. It explains the similarities and the differences — the similarities because they are all responses to the same Real, the differences because they are filtered through different cultural categories. And it has a practical payoff: it underwrites tolerance and mutual respect, because no tradition can claim to have the sole or final access to the Real.

The Challenge of Conflicting Truth Claims

The hardest challenge to pluralism is the conflict of truth claims. The Real an sich, on Hick's account, is beyond all conceptual schemes — beyond personal and non-personal, beyond one and many, beyond being and non-being. But the actual religions make specific, conflicting claims about the nature of ultimate reality. Christianity says God is personal and triune. Buddhism says the ultimate is non-personal and that the concept of a creator God is a mistake. These are not just different cultural expressions of the same thing. They are contradictory claims.

The pluralist has to say that these claims are true at the phenomenal level but not at the noumenal level — that the personal God of Christianity and the non-personal Dharmakaya of Buddhism are both genuine but culturally conditioned experiences of a Real that is, in itself, neither personal nor non-personal. This sounds reasonable until you notice that it means none of the religions is quite right about the nature of ultimate reality. The Christian says God is personal. The pluralist says: well, God is personal for you, but not in itself. The Buddhist says the ultimate is non-personal. The pluralist says: well, it is non-personal for you, but not in itself. But both the Christian and the Buddhist are making claims about how things really are, not about how things are for them. The pluralist, by saying that neither is quite right, is saying that both traditions are, in their core claims, mistaken. That is a bold claim, and it is not clear that the pluralist is in a better epistemic position than the traditions they are correcting.

Alvin Plantinga pressed this point. He argued that the pluralist's claim — that all the major religions are responses to the same Real — is itself a claim that contradicts what the traditions say about themselves. The pluralist is, in effect, saying to the Christian: your claim that God is personal is not quite true, because the Real is neither personal nor non-personal. But the pluralist is in no better position to know what the Real is like than the Christian is. So why should the pluralist's meta-claim about the nature of the Real take priority over the traditions' own first-order claims?

Plantinga's Defense of Exclusivism

Plantinga also defended exclusivism against the charge that it is arrogant or irrational. The common argument against exclusivism is epistemic: given that there are many religions, each claiming to be true, and given that most people's religion is determined by accidents of birth and culture, it is arrogant to think that yours happens to be the right one. The probabilistic argument says: if there are ten major religions and only one can be true, the prior probability that yours is the right one is one in ten. You should therefore be humble and withhold belief.

Plantinga's response draws on his reformed epistemology. The mere fact that there are other claimants does not mean yours is probably wrong. If you have good reason — if your belief is warranted by a properly functioning cognitive faculty, or if you have had a genuine religious experience — then your belief can be rational even if others disagree. The existence of disagreement does not, by itself, defeat a warranted belief. You believe that your memories are reliable even though you know that other people have false memories. You believe your spouse loves you even though you know that other people's spouses do not love them. The same structure applies, Plantinga argued, to religious belief. The pluralist's demand that you abandon your belief because others disagree is not obviously rational. It depends on assumptions about the epistemic situation that the exclusivist is entitled to reject.

Whether Plantinga's defense succeeds is a matter of ongoing debate. But it has shifted the burden. Pluralism can no longer assume that exclusivism is irrational by default. It has to argue for its position, and the argument is not easy to make.

The Political Dimension

There is a political dimension to religious pluralism that goes beyond the philosophical debate. In pluralistic democracies, the question is not just which religion is true but how people of different religions can live together. The political pluralist — as distinct from the theological pluralist — does not need to hold that all religions are true. They need to hold that all citizens, regardless of religion, deserve equal respect, equal rights, and equal voice in public life.

This is a weaker claim than Hick's pluralist hypothesis, and it is more widely accepted. You can be an exclusivist theologically and a political pluralist practically. You can believe that Christianity is the truest religion and also believe that a Muslim citizen deserves the same rights as a Christian one. The political question is about justice, not about truth, and it can be answered without resolving the metaphysical one.

The deeper question, though, is whether political pluralism can be sustained without theological pluralism underneath it. If you believe your religion is true and others are false, can you really treat them as equals? Or does the conviction of truth, over time, erode the commitment to equality? The history of religious conflict is not encouraging, but the history of religious tolerance — in India under Ashoka, in the Ottoman millet system, in the American founding — shows that it can be done. Whether it can be sustained in an era of intensified religious nationalism and global communication is one of the defining questions of our time.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Religious Pluralism" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-pluralism/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Philosophy of Religion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
• John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale University Press, 1989; 2nd ed. 2004).

Related Topics

• Faith vs Reason — the epistemology behind exclusivism and pluralism.
• What Is the Numinous? — the experiential basis Hick draws on.
• Religion vs Spirituality — the SBNR phenomenon as informal pluralism.
• What Is Secularization? — the cultural context of pluralism.
• Philosophy of Religious Experience — the field Hick and James shape.