Tower and Town, September 2018

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What My Religion Means To Me

Contributed by the Revd John Sargant.

I have been a Christian all my life. I have also been interested in other major world religions, but never had a chance to study them until the 1980s. Many people can be followers of Jesus Christ all their lives, without knowing anything about other religions.

It used to be quite simple: Christianity was right, so all the other religions must be wrong. A few Christians studied other religions, as a hobby called Comparative Religion. It didn’t affect one’s Christianity much. Now we can no longer keep other religions at a safe distance. We are into a dangerous phase where all the major world faiths affect each other.

Not surprisingly, Christians disagree about how other religions affect our own. Some take an exclusive view, that Christianity is the only true religion. At the other end of the spectrum are those who take a pluralist view that all major world religions are of equal value.

I find that my faith is in between these two views. I want to find out more about the millions of people who still follow the major world religions which have been around for centuries: Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians (there are others but the major six are all I can cope with.) As I meet members of these faiths, and find out more about what their religions means to them, the exclusive view seems to give them too little credit and the pluralist view leads to the very widespread modern attitude, that it doesn’t matter what you believe – and none of the six has ever taught that!

There are two very precious fruits of this inter-faith experience. First, the more I learn about any of the other five faiths, the more deeply I appreciate Christianity. For instance, God as Trinity, God as tremendous. Is God more real when experienced in other faiths as well as mine? And secondly, shouldn’t a Christian, especially a Christian Priest be telling other people about Christianity? That is exactly what I do in interfaith dialogue. Followers of other religions don’t want to know about church trivialities: they want to know about Jesus Christ, his Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, the Incarnation, all the central beliefs of my religion – that is what I am asked about as I learn more about other people’s religion.

John Sargant (1996)