Religious pluralism is “an affirmation of the validity of every religion, and the refusal to choose between them.”

With so many religions claiming they are “the one”, why would we even have a problem with religious pluralism? Our society has strove to coexist and be tolerable of one another, despite our ethnic, religious, and cultural differences. It’s one of America’s unwritten moral codes.

“But, pluralism requires more than acknowledging or celebrating diversity.” Religious pluralism is more than tolerating other religions; it is assenting to the notion that other religions could possibly hold some truths and therefore are not completely invalid. That makes our societal structure a heretical one.

But then, how is that accomplished without forgoing loyalties to your own religion? How can one be both an ardent servant to their faith and also be a heretic? Wouldn’t that make them a hypocrit?

In The Heretical Imperative, Berger describes the answer to that question like this:

* Religion serves as a tool for societal legitimization: it validates social order by giving it divine structure. And religious rituals allow for a sense of community.
* Religion then is a sacred canopy that protects us from facing our own existential angst.
* The modern person faces this angst as traditional religion loses its grip. There is not a plurality of worldviews; heresy (choice) is the universal and the taken-for-granted sense of reality is shattered.
* There are three main reactions to this crisis: deduction, reduction and induction.
* Deduction is an attempt to reassert religious certainty.
* Reduction is an attempt to critically evaluate religion in a social context. Religion is then seen as a product of its material culture.
* Induction is a phenomenological approach to religion. It takes seriously religious experiences and describes and compares them.

The first reponse, deduction, is the most difficult position to take in America. A deductionist would have the following approach: “I know the whole truth and therefore have nothing more to learn from you, the world, or science.” “If you hold a view that is contradictory to mine, you are worthless.” “The world needs to conform to my beliefs and any new world theories should be twisted to fit my views.” (Okay so that may be a little extreme, but you get the point.) Most fundamentalists take a deductive approach. To do otherwise, would mean that they lack faith. But by being a deductionist, they are almost un-American in the sense that they are wanting others to not have the freedom to believe something different (religiously, scientifically, or otherwise) from them. Those who promote pluralism with heresy often claim that criticizing a religion, and/or insisting that one's own religion is exclusivistic is intolerant or even hateful.

The second response, reduction, is the enemy of deduction. Better known as the skeptic, a reductionist would take the following approach: “You didn’t speak in tongues, you were just feeling over zealous.” “Get over yourself – you didn’t make a fashionable entrance, you were just late.” They take events/circumstances/phenomena and make them simple incidents. Fundamentalists battle Reductionists because they are at opposite ends of the religious spectrum. While both are critical of one another, being a reductionist in America is socially accepted.

The third response is the middle road – induction. And inductionst does not claim to have the answers, nor do they dismiss religious phenomena. Rather, they believe a person’s religious experience over religious law/tradition. The difficulty with this position is that it is precarious and indecisive. If ever the inductionist took a solid stance, they would have left the middle road and joined either the deductionist or the reductionist. Most people who believe the "all religions lead to God" are unaware of the insurmountable intellectual difficulties with this view. Therefore, the claim that one religion is exclusively true is often met with the charge that one is dogmatic, narrow-minded, or just plain arrogant. While an inductionist could honestly not know when they claim to be ignorant on the matter of religious truth, they won’t win over of the two other responses; choosing to be ignorant is not the same as being tolerant.

If a Christian took an induction viewpoint, they would be a heretic. To hold beliefs which fall outside of a plausibility structure (a social structure of ideas making a belief plausible or not) is to be a heretic in the original sense of the word haeresis, that is to say, one who makes his own decisions. So while they are sitting in a Sunday church service where the preacher says “Jesus is the way” a reductionist would be thinking “Is he the only way?”.

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