civil rights movement was a purely humanitarian endeavor. The French Revolution had nothing to do with Catholicism, and the U.S. The Spanish conquered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New England to catch fish. My students are good with “respectful,” but they are allergic to “argument.” They see arguing as ill-mannered, and even among friends they avoid it at any cost.… Especially when it comes to religion, young Americans at least are far more likely to say “I feel” than “I think” or (God forbid) “I believe.” (4)Īll too often world history is told as if religion did not matter.
In my Boston University courses, I work hard to foster respectful arguments. In a section called “Allergic to Argument” he described a frustrating reality that I see almost every day as a minister to college students:
Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order.Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation.Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission.To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. The book is well summed up on the inside front dust jacket: Here are some bits I was particularly keen on: Be that as it may, he makes some true but unfashionable claims in his introduction. Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University who was raised Episcopalian but has since rejected Christianity. I recently read/skimmed Stephen Prothero’s book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter.
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