“All Religions Are the Same” (And Other Things People Say)

I was on a plane several years ago and struck up a conversation with the woman sitting beside me. At the time, I was working as a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, which meant I was never quite sure whether I wanted people to ask what I did for a living. It could make for a very long and awkward three-hour flight back to San Diego.

But she did ask.

After explaining that a Catholic apologist is not, in fact, someone who apologizes for the Catholic Church, but someone who defends its teachings, she replied, “I think all religions are equal.”

Yep. She really said that. You don’t believe me, do you? You think I made it up to hook you into the article. But no. She did.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I think they’re all getting at the same truth,” she said, “just using different language.”

So I pressed her a little. After all, many religious claims are mutually exclusive. A pantheist believes the universe is God. Islam teaches that God is distinct from the universe. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. Modern Jews disagree. Some religions teach reincarnation. Christianity teaches resurrection.

Eventually, she admitted what she really meant. She didn’t actually think all religions were equally true. She thought it was arrogant for someone to say their religion was true and that those who disagreed with them were mistaken.

You’ve met this kind of person before. Perhaps you were this kind of person before. The kind person who says things like “Who am I to say what’s true?”; “All religions are basically the same.”; “Everyone has their own truth.”

Interestingly, this position is self-referentially incoherent. The kind of person who says that nobody should claim to know what is absolutely true is, at the same time, claiming to know what is absolutely true, namely, that it is wrong to do so. He says everyone has their own truth, while also insisting it is false for someone to deny that claim, and so on and so forth. Few people are as intolerant as those who insist tolerance must be the highest virtue.

But okay. In this short article I’d like to directly respond to the following objection:

“How can Christians be so arrogant as to think they alone have the truth?”

As I’ve said before, it’s usually wise to agree with people where we can before disagreeing with them where we must. So we can certainly agree that Christians can behave arrogantly at times. We’ve all encountered the smug internet apologist who seems far more interested in winning arguments than loving his neighbor (how dare you look at me like that). Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean conviction is the same thing as arrogance. If it did, then your conviction that it is arrogant would itself be arrogant.

To say something is true is not necessarily arrogant. It may simply mean you’ve become persuaded that it corresponds to reality.

If I tell you that two plus two equals four, you wouldn’t accuse me of arrogance. If I said I was certain I was born in Sydney, Australia, you wouldn’t roll your eyes and reply, “Wow. Pretty dogmatic.”

In every area of life we recognize that some beliefs are better grounded than others. Yet when religion enters the discussion, many people suddenly act as though certainty itself is immoral.

But why?

The Catholic Church actually has a far more nuanced view of other religions than many critics, or recent converts still in the “cage stage,” realize. The Church explicitly teaches that truth can be found outside her visible boundaries:

“The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [other] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” (Nostra Aetate, 2).

To belabor the point, Catholicism doesn’t teach that every non-Christian religion has no goodness or insight. Human beings possess reason. We can perceive moral truths. We can recognize beauty. We can grasp aspects of justice, self-sacrifice, love, transcendence, and even God Himself through the natural light of reason.

And this isn’t a modern idea. St. Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, went so far as to say:

“Whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians.”

You can find real wisdom in Plato. Real moral insight in Confucius. Real longing for transcendence in Buddhism. Real reverence for God in Judaism and Islam. Christians shouldn’t feel nervous or hostile when acknowledging this.

And yet, Christians also believe something more specific. They believe truth is not merely an abstract principle or philosophical concept. Truth became flesh. Jesus Christ did not say, “I will show you a way.” Or, “there are many ways to God. No, He said:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

We’ve heard these words so often that we can fail to appreciate just how wild the claim really is. To get some sense of how shocking it may have sounded, imagine your next-door neighbor Bill saying it. You’d assume he was joking. Or that he should switch to decaf immediately.

Jesus Christ did not merely claim to teach truth. He claimed to be Truth itself, and that reconciliation with God comes uniquely through Him. That’s either, madness, blasphemy, or, possibly, the most important statement ever uttered.

But if a Christian has become convinced of this. And that Christ truly rose from the dead, then believing Christianity is true is no more arrogant than believing water is wet.

C. S. Lewis famously put it this way:

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher… Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.”

Now of course Christians should hold these convictions with humility. We are not saved because we are smarter than everyone else. Thank God!

In fact, Christianity fundamentally undermines pride because it teaches that truth itself is received as grace.

As St. Paul says:

“What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7).

Or as the Catechism states:

“The missionary task implies a respectful dialogue with those who do not yet accept the Gospel. Believers can profit from this dialogue by learning to appreciate better those elements of truth and grace which are found among peoples, and which are, as it were, a secret presence of God” (CCC 856).

In the end, the objection that Christianity is “arrogant” usually rests on a misunderstanding of what Christians are actually claiming.

The Christian claim is not, “I am better than you.” Christianity begins with the exact opposite premise: that all of us are fallen, sinful, confused creatures in desperate need of mercy.

A Christian is simply someone who has become persuaded that God has revealed Himself definitively in Jesus Christ. And if that is true, then sharing that truth is not arrogance. It is charity.

If a man discovered a cure for a deadly disease, we would not accuse him of arrogance for telling others about it. We would accuse him of cruelty if he kept it to himself.

Christians evangelize for the same reason one starving man tells another starving man where he found bread.