You may have heard by now that 23 Egyptians, mostly Coptic Christians, have been killed in Egypt in violence believed to have been incited by elements in the Egyptian army. The army is thought to be stirring up Islamic extremist elements in Egyptian society to scapegoat the country’s Christian minority, thereby taking heat off the generals. Alaa Al Aswany, an Egyptian Muslim, writes today against the Salafist Muslims in his country, and their hatred of all things they deem impure, including Christianity and non-fundamentalist forms of Islam. Excerpt:

Do you consider yourself primarily a Muslim, a Christian, or a human being? Is your primary allegiance to your religion, or does being part of humanity take precedence over any other allegiance? How you answer this question will define your view of the world and how you treat others. If you see yourself as human before any other consideration, then you will certainly respect the rights of others regardless of their religion. A proper understanding of religion necessarily makes you more attached to humankind, because religion in essence means defending human values: justice, freedom, and equality. But if you think your religious affiliation takes precedence over being a part of humankind, you have started down a dangerous path that will generally end in bigotry and violence.

Religion by nature is not a point of view but an exclusive belief that does not assume the truth of other religions. It starts when someone believes that his or her religion is the sole truth. This contempt for other religions is bound to make you belittle those who follow them, and people who belittle one another can never enjoy the same human rights. This way of thinking will gradually lead you to dehumanize people whose religions are different: you will think about people of other religions as a group, not as individuals. If you’re a Muslim, you won’t see your Christian neighbor as a human being with an independent existence and with his own way of behaving. You will see him as one Copt among many, and think that Copts in general have certain distinctive traits and ways of behaving. You will have taken another step toward hatred.

I don’t completely agree with this, but Al Aswany’s statement here does raise a significant question about religion and truth in an era of pluralism. In a National Geographic interview, Aswany proclaims that though he is a Muslim, he is also a universalist: “[I]t’s my opinion that religions are the same everywhere. They are a way to find God, a way to have positive values, to prove oneself as a good human being. I was born Muslim, so I am Muslim. If I had been born Christian, I would have been Christian.” This is fine-sounding nonsense, unfortunately. I mean, it’s a great approach to religion for a pluralistic society, but it does not take religion seriously, judging it instead by its social utility. Don’t get me wrong: if I were a Christian in Egypt, I would hope that all Muslims would think like Al Aswany. But if I were a Muslim in Egypt, even a tolerant, liberal one, I could not go as far as Al Aswany, because his universalism implicitly denies the particular truth proclaimed by Islam, especially the foundational one: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet.” Similarly, someone who said he was a Christian but said that Christianity, whose founder said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light; no one comes to the Father but through me,” but that Christianity was but one equally valid option among many, would be in some sense a deceiver, even if the first person he deceives is himself.

Al Aswany, like most universalist critics of religious particularism, mistakenly views the truth or falsity of a religion an an either-or choice. He says that religion by its very nature “does not assume the truth of other religions.” Really? This probably does describe the approach very many, perhaps most, religious believers regard their religion, or at least have done through most of human history. But is this view correct? Doesn’t the current understanding of the Roman Catholic Church — that the fullness of truth resides in the Roman church, but that truth can be found to a lesser degree in other churches — offer a more realistic and truthful model for thinking about religious truth? In this model, a faithful Catholic could say, “I am not a Presbyterian [or Muslim, or pagan, etc.], but insofar as Presbyterianism [Islam, paganism] contains within it things that the Catholic Church acknowledges are true and good, then there is truth to be found in those religions.” Similarly, a faithful Muslim is not compelled to say that every religion that is not Islam is therefore equally false; in fact, by making a distinction among the “People of the Book,” as being set apart from the rest of non-Muslim humanity, it seems to me that Islam is prepared to acknowledge that there are degrees of truth within the broader human community of believers.

In fact, the well-meaning universalism of Al Aswany doesn’t do what he thinks it does (defuses religious bigotry), but probably does its opposite. If the choice religious believers have is to regard all religions but their own as wholly false, or regard all religions as equally true, then they will more than likely accept the first stance, which is the fundamentalist one.

Second, what does Al Aswany mean when he writes, “religion in essence means defending human values: justice, freedom, and equality.” Says who? This is humanitarianism. An atheist humanist could affirm those “human values” too. Besides which, how do we know justice, freedom, and equality are things to be valued? And that they apply to all humans, not just those of our tribe? Whose justice? Where is the human society that has arrived at these things without religion? Where is the human society that has sustained them without religion? Europe’s experiment in being civilized while rejecting the religious basis for civilization is still too fresh to draw any conclusions. Al Aswany is assuming far, far too much, and, it seems to me, taking his cosmopolitan universalism as the normative state of mankind. Insofar as he is eager to urge all of us to respect others, even if they do not share our faith, of course I support him. But I don’t do so because I agree with him that religious belief is a subcategory of the basic category called Human, and that I owe allegiance to Humanity before the God of my religion. I believe that all humans have equal worth and dignity — which entails the right to be wrong about God — because my religion, which I believe is true, tells me so. Yes, it is possible for people who do not have any faith at all to affirm these things, it is only possible, from a practical point of view, because the humanist worldview emerged from the Christian religious and philosophical matrix. For most people in most places over the course of human history, tribalism has been the default setting. Ever looked into what the Greeks, among the most enlightened people ever to walk the earth, thought of non-Greeks?

In his new book “Religion in Human Evolution,” the sociologist Robert Bellah writes about how the kind of universalism proclaimed by Al Aswany and many other elites today is an extremely new thing in the history of religion. Excerpt:

Great as the major figures of the axial age were, and universalistic as their ethics tended to be, we cannot forget that each of them considered his own teaching to e the only truth or the highest truth, even such a figure as the Buddha, who never denounced his rivals but only subtly satirized them. Platon, Confucius, Second Isaiah, all thought that it was they and they alone who had found the final truth. This we can understand as an inevitable feature of a world so long ago.

But it is painfully relevant for a book dealing with religious evolution to remember that even the best of early modern thinkers normally assumed the superiority of Christianity to all other religions. For Kant and Hegel, perhaps the most influential of all modern philosophers, it wasn’t just Christianity that was superior, it was Protestant Christianity in particular, a view widespread until just yesterday.

The point here is that the belief that all religions are basically the same, and that none is essentially any better or any worse than another, is wholly contemporary. Interestingly, Bellah goes on to dismiss (seemingly) this view as “new age.” Yet he says that today, we have to grapple with the experience of pluralism, and figure out how to deal honestly and respectfully with the religious experiences and traditions of others without falling into relativism. How do we pull this off? It requires a lot of intellectual sophistication and subtlety of mind, I think. For most people, it will be far easier to accept a fundamentalist viewpoint, or to give oneself over to the weak relativist tea that is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.