Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, and Stages of Faith

Adherents of current day religion must reflect upon questions that religious people of the past—secure in more self-contained and homogeneous communities and societies—rarely had to face. Why do I belong to one religion rather than another? Can more than one religion be true? How should my religion relate to the others? Religious pluralism is equally challenging for those who do not align with a particular tradition but who, nevertheless, feel religious longings and seek spiritual experiences within the context of secular culture. This chapter characterizes contemporary spirituality as direct experience of the sacred in the myriad forms in which it may manifest, and proposes an experiential, pragmatic, relational view of religious truth grounded in its power to effect self-transformation in practitioners. The author defines faith, as distinguished from belief, and depicts faith as a developmental process that moves from literal and conventional stages to increasingly reflective and conjunctive stages—a journey that correlates with movement from egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric forms of identity. He distinguishes exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist attitudes towards religions other than one’s own and advocates for the pluralist perspective, encouraging us to encounter other traditions as a means for deepening and expanding our own spirituality.