What do we do with the fact that thoughtful, sincere people have encountered ultimate reality through very different religious traditions? If none of us can stand outside culture, language, and history to judge those traditions from a completely neutral position, how do we decide what to trust? A recent conversation with a parishioner sent me back to these questions—and ultimately to why I continue to choose Jesus.

Recently, I exchanged emails with a thoughtful member of my church about Jim Palmer’s article, “The Place We Never Left.” We’ve been reading and discussing these questions together, along with Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Both raise important questions for me: If human beings have developed so many different religions, how do we decide which to trust? Are the religions fundamentally different, or are they different ways of describing the same ultimate reality? Can we draw the best insights from several traditions and combine them into a spirituality that works for us? And, perhaps most importantly, how can any of us know that the religion we believe in is true?

These are not abstract questions but go to the heart of what it means to have faith in a religiously pluralistic world.

I have read Douthat’s Believe and agree with some of its central ideas. I also appreciate Palmer’s article because I think it offers an important check, reminding us to remain intellectually humble about what we can know when discussing ultimate reality.

As my parishioner and I discussed these ideas, he offered an analogy. There are many kinds of food—Mexican, French, Japanese, barbecue, Italian—and yet they all nourish us. We can appreciate each cuisine on its own, but we can also borrow ingredients and techniques from other cuisines and sometimes create something wonderful by combining them. Why, he wondered, couldn’t spirituality work the same way?

The analogy highlights the variety of religious claims and systems, but I think it ultimately breaks down, and understanding why leads us to something important about the nature of religion itself.

Religions Are Not Simply Different Flavors of the Same Thing

Mexican, French, and Japanese cuisines can be combined without posing much of an intellectual problem because cuisines do not make mutually exclusive metaphysical claims about reality. Religions sometimes do.

Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and other traditions may share profound insights into compassion, suffering, ego, transcendence, community, and the spiritual life. Christians should be able to recognize and engage with wisdom wherever it is encountered. But that does not mean these traditions are simply different versions of the same thing.

They sometimes give very different answers to the most fundamental questions people ask: What is ultimate reality? Who or what is God? What is a human being? What has gone wrong with us and the world? What does salvation or liberation mean? What happens when we die?

Those differences matter.

That’s one reason I appreciate Palmer’s warning against prematurely blending religions. We should learn from other traditions, but we need to let them remain genuinely distinct long enough to hear what they are saying. Otherwise, we can easily take the parts we like from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other traditions, reinterpret them through assumptions we have never examined, and end up creating a spirituality that mostly confirms what we already believe.

And in some ways, that is exactly backward. One of the things a religious tradition can do for us is expose the assumptions that already shape us and sometimes distort the way we see ourselves and the world.

When the Self Becomes Its Own Religion

Robert Bellah and his colleagues identified something very much like this in their landmark book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. They argued that American culture forms us deeply in individualism, particularly in our tendency to regard the individual self as the ultimate authority on what is true, meaningful, and good.

Because we are shaped by our culture long before we begin consciously examining it, we can carry these assumptions into our spiritual lives without even realizing it.

Bellah and his colleagues famously encountered a woman named Sheila, who described her personal religion as “Sheilaism.” She had essentially constructed a spirituality based on her own intuitions and experiences. The example became memorable because it captured something much larger unfolding in American religious life.

We can easily assume that religion is a collection of beliefs and practices from which the autonomous individual selects whatever seems useful: a little Christianity, a little Buddhism, a little Hinduism, perhaps some contemplative practice or psychology. We then assemble the pieces into a spirituality that “works for me.”

The problem is not that religions must somehow remain historically pure. They never have. Religious traditions have always influenced one another, evolved over time, and interacted with the surrounding cultures. Christianity itself has a long history of development, interpretation, disagreement, and engagement with diverse philosophical and cultural worlds.

The deeper problem is that selective borrowing can misrepresent what a religion actually is.

Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and the other great religious traditions are not merely collections of detachable spiritual insights. Each offers a complex way of understanding and inhabiting reality, with its own stories, symbols, practices, moral demands, metaphysical claims, and an account of what constitutes a good and meaningful human life.

If I extract individual elements from those larger systems and retain only those that already resonate with me, I may think I am cultivating a richer, more universal spirituality, but I am actually creating “Markism”—my own highly individualized religion whose ultimate authority remains me.

And then something ironic has happened. Instead of allowing another religious tradition to challenge my worldview, I have made my existing worldview the standard by which I judge every religion.

If I reshape every religion until it fits comfortably within the worldview I already possess, I have not truly allowed any of them to explain reality to me. I have made myself the explanatory framework and reduced the religions to resources within it.

That causes us to miss one of the most important things a religious tradition can do: offer an alternative interpretation of reality that confronts my assumptions, challenges my desires, trains my perception, and forms me into a different kind of person.

There Is No God’s-Eye View

But this raises another problem, and this is where contemporary philosophy and theology have deeply shaped the way I think.

There is no God’s-eye view available to us.

None of us stands outside history, culture, language, family, psychology, and tradition in a completely neutral place from which we can put Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, atheism, and every other worldview on a table and objectively determine which is true.

We are always already standing somewhere.

Even the person who says, “I don’t subscribe to any religion; I’m simply looking objectively at the evidence,” approaches the evidence with assumptions about reality inherited from a particular culture, language, history, and intellectual tradition. Secularism is no more a view from nowhere than Christianity is.

This is one of the key insights I draw from modern hermeneutics, particularly Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work. We never interpret reality from nowhere. We bring a “horizon” of language, history, experience, questions, and assumptions to everything we encounter. This does not mean there is no truth. It means our access to truth is always that of historically situated human beings.

This is also one reason I have found postliberal theology helpful. In The Nature of Doctrine, theologian George Lindbeck proposed understanding religions in what he called “cultural-linguistic” terms. A religion is not simply a collection of propositions that we decide whether to believe. It offers something more like a language and a world to inhabit.

Think about Christianity: Creation. Sin. Covenant. Incarnation. Cross. Resurrection. Grace. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. Kingdom of God. These are not isolated religious ideas. Together, they form a story that teaches Christians to interpret God, themselves, others, suffering, hope, death, and ultimately reality itself in a particular way.

Learning Christianity, then, is somewhat like learning a language.

You can study Spanish grammar from a textbook and learn a great deal about Spanish without ever living in a Spanish-speaking culture. But that is different from becoming immersed in the language until you begin thinking, and perhaps even dreaming, in Spanish.

Religion works in a similar way.

I can study Buddhism or Islam academically and develop a sophisticated understanding of either tradition. But that is not the same as seeing reality as a committed Buddhist or Muslim does from within that tradition’s symbolic world.

And the same is true of Christianity.

Religion as an Explanation of Reality

This is where I think another analogy is helpful. A religious worldview is somewhat like an explanatory theory in science, though I would not push the comparison too far.

One reason a scientific theory becomes compelling is its explanatory power. How much of the available evidence does it explain? Does it illuminate phenomena that would otherwise remain confusing? Does it unify apparently disconnected observations into a coherent whole? Does it continue to make sense of what we discover?

Religions attempt something analogous on a much larger existential and metaphysical scale.

They try to make sense of love and suffering, beauty and evil, guilt and forgiveness, consciousness and morality, life and death, our longing for meaning, experiences of transcendence, and our persistent intuition that reality may contain more than we can measure.

A religious worldview becomes compelling, at least in part, because of its capacity to illuminate these experiences and weave them into a coherent account of reality. Because religion is not merely theoretical, another question becomes important: What happens to human beings who actually live within this account of reality? What kind of life does it make possible?

But here is the catch: I don’t think you can adequately answer that question while remaining outside the tradition. You have to inhabit it.

Some Things Can Only Be Known Through Participation

I don’t think you really understand what it means to see the world through Jesus by studying Christian doctrines alone.

You have to pray, forgive those who hurt you, and try to love your enemies. You have to serve the poor, practice generosity, worship in community, receive grace when you fail, and seek to order your life around the teachings of Jesus.

Eventually, if the tradition takes root deeply enough, it begins to train your perception. You start seeing things you hadn’t seen before.

This distinction matters because religious knowledge is not merely intellectual knowledge. Some things we can only know through participation.

You can read everything ever written about friendship and still lack a kind of knowledge of friendship available only to someone who has actually had a friend. You can study romantic love scientifically, psychologically, and philosophically without knowing what it means to love another person from the inside. Participation gives us a kind of knowledge that observation alone cannot provide.

“Some truths can only be discovered through participation.”

I think something similar happens with religion. And this is where faith becomes so important.

We would like to imagine that we could investigate every possible worldview, achieve certainty about which one is correct, and only then commit ourselves to it. But I don’t think human beings actually have that option. There’s simply too much we can’t know, especially when the subject is ultimate reality.

At some point, we have to risk trusting something—or, for Christians, someone.

Kierkegaard and the Risk of Faith

This is one reason Søren Kierkegaard has always been so helpful to me.

Kierkegaard understood that faith necessarily involves risk because objective certainty about the ultimate questions of existence is unavailable to us. This does not mean faith is irrational or that evidence is irrelevant. Rather, it means there is a point beyond which evidence cannot make existential commitment risk-free.

Eventually, I will have to decide.

My experience, the testimony of others, my deepest intuitions, my reasoning, and the explanatory power of a particular vision of reality may make commitment reasonable, but none of them can make it absolutely safe.

Eventually, I leap. And for me, that leap is Jesus.

Why I Leap Toward Jesus

I’m willing to take that leap for several reasons.

First, when I encounter the life and teachings of Jesus, something about them strikes a chord deep within me.

Love your enemies. Forgive as you have been forgiven. The greatest among you must become a servant. Blessed are the merciful and the peacemakers. Lose your life to find it. Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself.

When I encounter this vision of reality, my response is something like, “I cannot prove exactly HOW this is true, but something deep within me recognizes it is true.” And I don’t think that recognition is simply a private feeling that appears from nowhere.

Even what I experience as my deepest intuitions have been formed over time. I inherited a language, culture, stories, moral wisdom, and religious tradition from those who came before me. I have also accumulated my own experiences of love and loss, failure and forgiveness, suffering and healing, and relationships and community. I interpret my tradition through my experience and my experience through the tradition, and the two continually shape one another.

What I experience simply as “myself” is actually a self formed through this ongoing conversation between inheritance and experience.

That means my decision to trust Jesus necessarily involves trusting more than myself. I am also placing some degree of trust in the accumulated testimony of generations who encountered this story before me and found it disclosed something true about God, themselves, and the world.

And that is a genuine risk.

The tradition I inherited could be wrong. Certainly, the particular way we received it within community distorts various aspects of the tradition. I could even be inhabiting a system whose assumptions prevent me from recognizing some of its distortions precisely because I have learned to see the world through them.

There is no way to completely eliminate that possibility because, as I said earlier, there is no neutral place outside every tradition from which I can verify my worldview before trusting it.

Eventually, I have to decide whether I am willing to entrust myself to it.

Even the Leap Is Grace

This is also where my Christian interpretation of the experience itself becomes important.

Christianity gives me a theological language for understanding why the teachings of Jesus resonate with me. I don’t understand faith as something I entirely manufacture through an act of will.

As a Wesleyan Christian, I believe God’s grace is already at work before I consciously recognize it. John Wesley called this prevenient grace—the grace that “comes before.” Through the Holy Spirit, God awakens, draws, convicts, and illuminates us, bringing us to the point where trust becomes possible.

Grace does not eliminate my freedom, nor does it remove the risk inherent in faith. It makes my response possible.

So even the leap is ultimately an act of grace.

The Spirit gives me the capacity to trust and then the courage, strength, and hope to act on that trust. I still have to leap, and I still cannot know with absolute certainty beforehand that I will land where I hope. But I don’t believe I am making the leap alone.

The Leap Is the Beginning, Not the End

And then comes the part I think is especially important.

The leap isn’t the end of the process. It’s the beginning of a different kind of knowing.

Once I entrust myself to Jesus, I begin living as if this vision of reality is true. I forgive, pray, serve, and practice generosity. I try to love my enemies, accept grace when I fail, and participate in Christian community. I interpret my suffering, relationships, failures, hopes, and even death through the story of Jesus.

Over time, I discover from the inside what this way of seeing makes visible and what kind of person it makes possible.

That still does not give me absolute proof that Christianity is metaphysically correct in every claim Christians make. But it gives me something I could never acquire by standing outside Christianity and analyzing it intellectually: experiential knowledge of what happens when I entrust my life to this story and inhabit it as though it is true.

And for me, that experience continually deepens the trust that made the leap possible in the first place.

There is a cyclical movement here, but it’s not a vicious circle. It’s a spiral that leads us forward, or better yet, deeper. The tradition helps me interpret my experience, while my experience continually tests, deepens, questions, and sometimes corrects my understanding of the tradition. Faith seeks understanding, and understanding deepens faith, and the process continues.

Commitment Does Not Require Closing the Door

This kind of commitment does not prevent us from learning from other religions. I think it actually makes for more honest interreligious dialogue.

As a Christian, I can encounter Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, among others, and allow those traditions to challenge me, expose blind spots in my own tradition, and even teach me, without pretending that I somehow stand above all religions in a neutral position.

That allows me to approach another tradition honestly, humbly, and respectfully.

Honestly, because I can acknowledge, “I am interpreting what you believe through a Christian framework.”

Humbly, because I know my framework is historically and culturally situated and that I could be wrong about some things.

And respectfully, because I can allow another person to tell me what their tradition means from within their tradition rather than immediately translating it into my own categories.

Although I’m coming from a different perspective and trying to do something different from Palmer, I really like his work and agree with many of his points, including his insistence that we not assume all religions are saying the same thing in different ways. They aren’t, and such an assumption can be disrespectful because it suggests we are no longer listening carefully enough to hear the differences. As a Christian mystic, I also appreciate how he shifts our thinking about ultimate reality to emphasize non-duality and participation.

At the same time, I agree with Douthat about the importance of commitment, because endlessly sampling religious possibilities can keep us from discovering the kind of truth available only through participation.

So How Do I Know Christianity Is True?

For me, the question is not, “Can I prove that Christianity is the one objectively correct metaphysical system?”

I don’t think I can. And I don’t think anyone else can prove their worldview from a completely neutral standpoint either. Human beings do not have the luxury of absolute certainty when speaking about God and ultimate reality. That means genuine faith must always leave room for honest doubt, self-criticism, and the prophetic spirit that questions how our traditions can become distorted by culture, power, fear, and self-interest.

Faith, then, is not the absence of questions or doubt but the willingness to keep trusting in God’s goodness even as we ask them. In the biblical tradition, wrestling with God is not the opposite of faith. It’s often one of its deepest expressions. We commit ourselves to a way of seeing while remaining humble enough to listen, question, repent, and allow both our understanding of God and of ourselves to be transformed.

Instead, I ask: Does this vision of reality make sense of my experience? Does it illuminate reality in a coherent and compelling way? Does it explain things that otherwise remain difficult for me to understand? And what kind of person do I become when I entrust my life to it?

Does seeing the world through Jesus make me more loving, honest, compassionate, courageous, and forgiving? Does it help me let go of my ego, recognize the sacred worth of every human being, and motivate me to work for justice, especially for the most vulnerable in society? Does this way of life draw me into a deeper experience of God and make it possible for me to become the kind of person I believe I was created to be?

These questions can’t truly be answered until I commit my life to following Jesus and actually living it, because some truths can only be discovered through participation. I must live inside the story long enough to discover what kind of world it reveals and what kind of person it enables me to become.

This doesn’t reduce truth to “whatever works for me.” Christianity can challenge me precisely because I am not the final criterion of its truth. Nor does transformation prove every Christian metaphysical claim. The claim is more modest than that. If a religion presents itself as a true account of reality and a way of life ordered toward human transformation, then its capacity to illuminate experience and to produce the kind of life it promises is relevant evidence when we consider whether to continue trusting it.

For me, Christianity continues to pass that test, and Jesus remains the one to whom I am willing to entrust my life.

Where the Food Analogy Finally Breaks Down

This brings me back to the conversation that motivated me to write this article.

At the end of the day, I think the food analogy is effective at highlighting religious diversity and the value of traditions not my own. However, it can also be misleading because it risks misunderstanding what religion is trying to do.

Religion is not primarily a collection of spiritually nourishing ingredients from which we select whatever tastes good to us. A religious tradition offers a comprehensive way to interpret and inhabit reality. It tells a story about what ultimately exists, who we are, what has gone wrong with us and the world, what human flourishing looks like, and how we ought to live. Its individual beliefs and practices derive much of their meaning from their place within that larger vision.

Combining a practice from Buddhism, a teaching from Christianity, and a metaphysical idea from Hinduism is therefore not quite like mixing ingredients from different cuisines. Those elements belong to larger interpretive systems that may make fundamentally different—and sometimes mutually incompatible—claims about reality.

Once we remove them from those systems and combine them in ways that seem meaningful or useful to us, we may no longer allow any of those religions to interpret reality for us.

“Instead, we become the interpretive system.”

And to me, that is the central problem with the food analogy. With food, I am supposed to decide what tastes good. But religion is supposed to do something far more demanding. It is supposed to challenge, form, and sometimes overturn my existing understanding of myself and the world. If I accept only those parts of a religion that already make sense within my present worldview, I have protected that worldview from the very thing religion is capable of doing—offering me an alternative vision of reality and teaching me how to inhabit it.

This is why faith ultimately requires more than sampling.

It requires enough humility to admit that I do not have a God’s-eye view, enough courage to risk trusting something I cannot prove with absolute certainty, and enough commitment to inhabit that way of seeing long enough to discover what it reveals.

For me, that means following Jesus.

Not because I can stand outside every possible worldview and prove beyond doubt that Christianity wins, but because this is the tradition that first formed me, in a culture deeply shaped by the Judeo-Christian story, and because as I have grown, questioned, studied, and lived within it, I have continued to find Jesus compelling enough to trust. For me, his story is powerful enough to inhabit, and his way of life teaches me how to see God, myself, other people, and the world more clearly.

Sources Mentioned

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. With a new preface. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Douthat, Ross. Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Books, 2025.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Lindbeck, George A. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. 25th anniversary ed. With a new introduction by Bruce D. Marshall and a new afterword by the author. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

Palmer, Jim. “The Place We Never Left: What an Ancient Vedantic Insight Taught Me about Jesus, Belonging, and the Illusion of Separation.” Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer, September 2, 2026. “The Place We Never Left”

Continue the Journey

I discuss some of these ideas in my book, What Christians Do: Living Like Jesus in a Divided World, where I explore six practices rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus that can help us become people of greater humility, compassion, courage, justice, and love

Coming October 6, 2026 from Abingdon Press.

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