How we study religion is important for our conversations

Recently I ran across a couple of examples that remind me of how important the way we study religion is to the conversations we have with each other about them.

In one instance, someone posted a meme in the comments section of Facebook in response to the Same God film that tells the story of Layricia Hawkins and her conflict with Wheaton College over her actions on social media in relation to embodied solidarity with Muslims. A respondent, likely a conservative evangelical, posted a meme that argues for understanding Islam as a “devil worshipping death cult” that arose out of the deity Allah whose origins allegedly come from an “arabian Moon God, also known as Baal, Hubal, and Molech.” I responded that this approach might not be the best in trying to persuade Muslims to consider a Christian perspective about Islam. What I didn’t go into in my comments was the highly problematic way of understanding Islam that this meme represents. And it’s found not just in memes. This argument has been made by an evangelical apologetics book. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for evangelicals to analyze other religions in a very superficial way, taking complex and diverse groups and boiling them down to simple (simplistic?) doctrines that can be refuted by way of a comparative template.

But it’s not just Christians who can fall prey to superficial religious understandings. In another example, a Muslim dialogue partner recently posted an article on Facebook that he endorsed. It emphasized understanding the “essence of Christianity” as a set of principles free from “theology and doctrines.” This includes things like Jesus’s teachings about the importance of the Great Commandments, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. While I appreciate and embrace these teachings, I replied in the comments section that it is inappropriate to separate the teachings and ethics of Jesus from the historical, narrative, and religious context of his time. I also pointed out that this “essence of Christianity” says nothing about the Gospel of the Kingdom that was at the center of his proclamation. I think I know why my Muslim friends finds this understanding of Christianity so agreeable: it results in a Christianity more in keeping with Islam’s understanding of it, and Jesus not as Son of God who dies and rises again, but instead as a prophet preaching a universal message of obedience to God with Muhammed as the final and greatest prophet with a similar message.

The problem with both of these examples is an approach to other religions not on their own terms with their complexity, diversity, and messiness. But instead, by way of a simplified “essence” that makes a given religion either an easy target to be dismissed, or in keeping with one’s own religous assumptions as the superior religion. These examples illustrate the importance of a proper understanding of religions based on careful study. To help with this for Christians I recommend Terry Muck’s book Why Study Religion: Understanding Humanity’s Pursuit of the Divine (Baker Academic, 2016). We desperately need care in our study of religion because it is vitally important for our conversations in a divided world.