The interfaith journey of an American girl.

Marshall, Michigan is one of those small Midwestern towns that represent many Americans' image of "hometown America." Our celebration of America's birth is one of the most vivid examples of this. On the Fourth of July, the people of Marshall gather around the large fountain and circular park in the center of town to celebrate with a kids' parade, the community band playing patriotic tunes, rides on the fire truck ladders, hundreds of pieces of chicken on long stretches of grills served with roles and macaroni salad, and strawberry short cake. The whole town comes out for the picnic and festivities. With young kids delightfully running around to catch the light mist spraying from the fountain, the citizens of Marshall lay out our blankets and lawn chairs, get the latest town gossip, visit with neighbors, and enjoy the music until late afternoon, when we pack up and head for local fireworks. A visitor to Marshall who witnessed this celebration once asked if there was a film crew working on a movie. No, we replied, this was not a set for a film. This was real life in our hometown. And growing up in Marshall, this was my image of America.

Priding itself on hospitality, its close community, and an ever growing number of antique stores, Marshall gave me a safe and nurturing home for the first 18 years of my life. Marshall allowed me to thrive in my community--to see my picture in our local newspaper, to dance and march in local parades, to perform on local stages, and to volunteer. While many of us young people yearned for a faster life, closer shopping centers, and more entertainment at night, we eventually realized what a unique and special community we had been raised in. The only problem with this environment was its lack of diversity. I knew there was racial diversity in the US and had interacted with African Americans and Hispanics, but I had met very few people who were not Christians. I assumed that other religions for the most part only existed on other continents.

For me, religious diversity was the more than thirty different Christian churches in Marshall. I attended the United Methodist church, but I had friends of many denominations. During confirmation, I visited the local Baptist church and witnessed full immersion communion, where a person was put fully under water for his baptism. In my own community, baptism was performed by sprinkling water on one's head. This, I thought, must be religious diversity. Outside of the Christian tradition, I was slightly familiar with Judaism from visiting the homes of one of the few Jewish people in my town. Morris was a leader in my community, and every year, he invited me to his house to practice my piano recital pieces on his grand piano. While in his home, I noticed hints of Judaism--foods and objects that I did not recognize. Yet I never thought more about it than that. Because they were absent from Marshall, any other religions were far too foreign for my awareness. I had no idea that every day there were new immigrants arriving in the United States, bringing with them their own religions. It simply did not occur to me that in my own country, there were entire communities in which people of other religions lived, worked, socialized, and remained faithful to religions other than Christianity.

With little experience of religious diversity and virtually no knowledge of the world's religions, my thoughts on other religions stemmed from one Bible verse, John 14:6--"I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one gets to the Father except through me." To me and my faith community, this verse suggested that Christianity was the only path to God. I was very active in my high school youth group, and through all of our Sunday and Wednesday night conversations, we never seriously considered the presence of other religions in the world. There was an assumption, usually unmentioned but sometimes articulated in a facetious manner, that Christianity was unquestionably the only true religion. Our evidence was John 14:6. We believed that learning about other religions would misguide us; they were traps that would take us away from our Christianity and therefore should be avoided. Did anyone teach us this mentality? I don't remember hearing it clearly stated, but it was an unspoken assumption that was never examined. Did we fear the "other" or simply ignore the "other"? Looking back, I'm simply not sure how or why this mentality existed, but it became my own. And because religious diversity was not a part of my life, I never questioned it.

I gave my first sermon on Easter Sunday during my senior year in high school. As I was considering what to preach about, I began thinking of the basic truths Christianity held for me and why I was a Christian. I decided to speak about how I knew Christianity was the real path to God. "Jesus Christ was resurrected," I stated. "Do any other religions have prophets or founders who were raised from the dead? This resurrection proves that God was with Jesus, and Christianity, the followers of a risen savior, must be the true religion." In all honesty, I did not know what other religions said about the deaths of their prophets and founders. And because I saw all religions through a Christian lens of interpretation, and Christianity claims the resurrection as one of its central themes, I assumed that other religions, if they were valid, would make similar claims about the divinity of their leaders. And since I did not know of any that did, in less than thirty seconds of my Easter sermon, I solved for myself and the congregation the question of whether other religions were valid.

While I am more than slightly embarrassed now by the bold claims I made then, these comments were the honest thoughts from a young Christian woman who deeply believed in her chosen faith path and who had not yet seen the faith of others. I did not know anyone who did not share my Christian background and its rituals, history, traditions, and assumptions. These were so much a part of who I was, and I pitied anyone who didn't get to share in these aspects of religion-Christmas, communion, creeds, congregational life ... This was Christianity, and since I knew so little about other religions, this was also how I defined religion. I believed that anyone who didn't have these aspects of religion was missing out on something.

While I had enjoyed my upbringing in Marshall, I was eager to begin my studies at Northwestern University, hoping to be challenged and to grow. Walking into my new home, a small dorm room crowded with plain furniture and off-white walls, I met Erica, a curly haired Jewish girl from South Miami Beach, Florida. After growing up with so little exposure to world religions, I was now going to be living with a young Jewish woman. But my introduction to other religions and people who followed them did not end in my dorm room. Through classes and other activities at college, I gradually met more and more people who were not Christian but who had their own deeply important beliefs, traditions, rituals, and understanding of the divine.

Despite my theological view that Christianity was the only real religion, I had a real curiosity about the religious experiences of the young people around me. I visited a Bahai temple, tasted matzah ball soup in our cafeteria, studied Wicca, learned about Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan, discovered why Muslim women wear a headscarf and what a yarmulke is, participated in interfaith dialogues, listened to Sikh music, and so much else. I was discovering that other religions had components which were just as powerful and moving to others as Christianity was to me. While it was still hard to imagine that one could pass by December 25 without any celebration of Christmas, I found that other religions offered their own holidays and rituals and traditions. They were not empty as I had imagined simply because they didn't do religion the way Christians do religion. I learned that there were other ways of being religious, some of which were very interesting to me.

The more I learned about other religions and other religious people, the more problematic my own theology became. The verse in John echoed in the corners of my mind as I engaged with other religions. Contrary to what I had previously believed, these experiences of other religions were not weakening my own faith, and my interactions with other religious people were exciting, not threatening, to me.

Continuing to search out opportunities to discuss religious diversity, I noticed a flyer advertising a panel discussion on major questions in Christianity, including the Christian view of other religions. It was sponsored by a Christian group on campus, and I hoped it would offer me different ways for Christians to think about other religions. I arrived in the auditorium anticipating a variety of perspectives on this question. Instead, I witnessed one person stand up for each of the three topics that had been chosen: homosexuality, other religions, and evangelization. Each person gave his or her view, which was accepted as the only answer, and then sat back down. Their answer for other religions was this: "Religions contain so many opposing views that they must be mutually exclusive. Because of these contradictions, either only one is right or they are all wrong. Christianity is right because Jesus rose from the dead." After encountering religious diversity, this argument, the same one I had made for my high school Easter sermon, suddenly felt inadequate. How could I dismiss the religions of my new friends, with their own histories, traditions, and rituals, so easily? How could I so simply decide that their deep religious experiences were not real, had no depth, and held no value? It was easy to answer these questions and hold an exclusivist theology when I had not interacted with religiously diverse people, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to retain this view at Northwestern.

A few weeks later, I witnessed a real-life example of viewing non-Christian religions as inferior. My roommate, Erica, drowsily left our dorm room one night and walked into the community bathroom. There, a vocal Christian woman began questioning Erica about being Jewish. She demanded that Erica consider making Jesus Christ her personal savior at 2 a.m. Did she know Jesus? Had anyone told her that she needed to accept Jesus in order to attain salvation from an eternal punishment? She continued pushing. Was she worried about hell? Had she read the New Testament? In a sleepy daze and frustrated by this woman's inappropriate questions, Erica answered that her roommate was a Christian and she had religious conversations with me but was not interested in converting, especially in the middle of the night. She then quickly left the bathroom and returned to the safety of our dorm room. When Erica relayed the story to me the next morning, I was embarrassed and appalled that a member of my tradition would choose such an inappropriate conversion technique and could not respect Erica's right to be Jewish in her own home. Erica had accurately stated that she and I had discussed religion frequently, but it was always in order to learn more about each other and our religions. I respected Erica's religion and wanted her to feel comfortable in our room and not feel like I was always judging her or trying to change her.

Soon after this incident, a Christian that I knew told me it was my responsibility to bring my dorm mates to Christ. "This may be their only opportunity to be saved. You may be the one person in their life that is supposed to tell them this news. If you do not, they may end up in hell. Do you wish that on your friends?" Of course I did not. Yet, I was very uncomfortable literally knocking on dorm room doors, as I had been asked to do, and share the Christian message with my fellow students. I felt it was inappropriate to barge into someone's living space and tell them that, although I didn't know them or their beliefs, I had a better answer for them. It definitely wasn't in my personality to do this, and I was increasingly wondering whether it was in my belief system. This can't possibly be the only Christian answer to religious diversity, I thought. So I decided to go searching for another answer: a Christian response to religious diversity other than conversion and condemnation; one that valued religions without comparing them to Christianity.

As a member of the United Methodist Church, I followed the "Wesleyan Quadrilateral", which states that Scripture, reason, experience, and tradition are all important and should be used together when doing theology. Now that I had experiences of religious diversity that I could bring into the conversation, I knew I needed to reconsider my theological understanding of other religions. I began spending more time at the United Methodist campus ministry. I sat down with Julie, my campus minister, and two other freshman students and realized that I was not the only one so confused about what to do with other religions. We decided to learn about other traditions through a series of "firesides," small gatherings of students. Each Wednesday night for five weeks, we listened to students who were Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist tell us about their faith. We discussed each others' practices and beliefs regarding everything from death to food to dating. We learned what it was like to wear a headscarf on campus and how Hindus worshipped, what Jews believed about the afterlife and what guided Buddhists. While it was far from an introduction to world religions, it was enough for us to realize that the students around us were practicing religions which were deep, involved, and meaningful. I had once believed that other religions could not offer the same religious experiences I received from Christianity, but I now knew otherwise. These conversations, my first glimpse into interfaith dialogue, taught me the importance of engaging with people of other faiths and learning from them.

After a taste of learning about other religions, I declared a religion minor and took my first religion class in college, "Religion in Human Experiences." This class made two major contributions to my search for Christian answers to religious diversity. First, my professor offered a story which I have since heard repeated about four blind men each feeling different parts of an elephant and each claiming that what they felt was actually the elephant. This was one way of understanding pluralism. Possibly, we each had a piece of Truth, even though our pieces appeared different. I sat in class that day, captured by the example and excited that I was being presented with another way of understanding religious diversity. Secondly, Diana Eck's Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras was on the course syllabus. As do so many other readers, I found myself identifying with Eck's introduction to other religions. While she traveled from Bozeman to Banaras, I had traveled from Marshall to Evanston. Not only was Eck writing as a Christian, but she also was a United Methodist. And in her book, I found the answer that I had been searching for since that unsettling night at the panel discussion where I had been told in clear terms that no religion outside of Christianity was valid and the correct Christian response to encounter with other religions was conversion. Indeed, there was a way to be fully Christian but also to view other religions as equally valid and worthy as my own.

While I finally had begun to put together a response to religious diversity that settled well with my own experiences, I now had to look back and see how my own religion might have changed in light of this answer. This began with looking back at John 14:6. "No one gets to the Father except through me." Through other theological journeys, I had realized that Scripture can be interpreted in many ways, and the exclusivist interpretation of this verse was not the only way to look at it. One could reinterpret this verse or go to other verses that support religious diversity. Eck does both in her book, showing that this verse isn't as clear a statement about the exclusive path of Christianity as some may suggest and that there are other verses which affirm religious diversity. But this verse still begs for more discussion. Are people of other religions "saved?" Do they go to heaven or hell? Is Jesus really saying, as so many people argue, that Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and any other non-Christians are following the wrong religion and will never attain salvation? As Eck states, one must look at the context of John 14:6. The question to which Jesus was responding with these words was not about the truth of other religions. In fact, Jesus was likely not familiar with many of today's world religions. Jesus is answering a question from Thomas about what to do and where to go after Jesus is gone. Jesus is offering a pastoral response to a worried Thomas. He is not condemning people who are not Christians. Using the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, I now look at this interpretation of John 14:6 along with my own experiences, my tradition, and reason to consider the salvation of non-Christians. To put it very simply, my experiences tell me that other religious people are having the same religious experiences as me, just through different methods. My path is to follow Jesus by loving and creating justice for all people, not just Christians. And my reason tells me that it simply doesn't make sense that the God I worship would condemn the majority of the world's population to an eternal punishment. There are many non-Christians who do tremendously good work in the world, and I simply can't reconcile that a God of love and justice would ignore these people because they were not operating under a Christian framework. I no longer feel the need to "save" other people from eternal damnation. I am not confident that I have the only answer or that there is only one path. Like climbing a mountain, there are many paths which all lead to the top. A friend once told me that if indeed we all face questioning at the gates of heaven after our death on earth, she would much rather say that she was too inclusive than too exclusive. She would much rather be too generous than too judgmental. While Scriptural debates will forever continue, I find myself agreeing with this friend. I believe God, a God of love, would rather have me be too inviting than too condemning.

I also found new ways of viewing evangelism. One of my ministers offered me his definition of evangelism: when one beggar tells another beggar where he or she found food. This definition spoke to me as a way to offer people what you have found to be helpful, what "tastes" good to you, without stating that it is the only food that will nourish your soul. This is the approach to sharing the "good news" of my faith with others that I have chosen to take. Making disciples, which is part of the Great Commission for Christians, has also been reframed in my theology. The Commission does not say what disciples must look like or if they should only follow Christianity. The importance of disciples is not what religion they belong to. Instead, it is about how we act in Jesus' image- how we serve others, how we are hospitable, how we help those in need ... Christianity is not the only religion that stresses these values; there are many religions which offer ways to do these things. There are many paths that all support these actions. This does not mean that everyone ultimately is a Christian; as I discovered, there are indeed real differences in religions. Instead, it changes the focus of discipleship from how we define ourselves religiously to how we act. It is not necessary for me to convert people to Christianity, but it is necessary for me to work with people of other religions to act together according to the shared values of our faiths.

These are just a few of the ways I now look at Christianity differently after my experiences with religious diversity. Nowhere along this journey has my own faith in Christianity diminished. Instead, my thirst for theological dialogue and knowledge about my own tradition has grown. As a Christian, the question of religious diversity was my first entrance into doing theology and thinking deeply about my religion. It was the first time I had been challenged to think on my own, use my own resources, do research, and create my own understanding rather than accepting one handed down to me. After this first experience, I knew I had found a deep passion. I felt called to do this work vocationally, and after graduation, I continued my education at Harvard Divinity School where I am currently studying and working towards ordination. Now when people maintain that learning about world religions pulls you away from your own tradition, I share my own story: learning about other religions compelled me to delve further into my own tradition, all the way to ordination! I now am active in the interfaith movement as well as my United Methodist and Christian communities. I have had the opportunity to work at the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, the Interfaith Youth Core, and the Pluralism Project. I have participated in and led many interfaith activities and am an advocate of interfaith work within The United Methodist Church.

The experience of engaging with religiously diverse people, which is occurring all over the United States, became my own experience when I went to college. It shifted my personal faith, my relationships with others, and my actions in the world. My Christian faith is still strong and growing, but I now am able to look at the beautiful religious diversity around me in new ways. I can appreciate traditions that are not my own, see value in beliefs that are not my own, and see the importance of rituals that are not my own. It is my hope that other Christians are able to find the answer I was looking for. Exclusivism is not the only approach acceptable for Christians. We do not have to convert others, proclaim ours as the only truth, or devalue other religions. There is a way to be Christian and to accept other religions and other religious people. In fact, I have found that it's a very Christian thing to do!