How to Choose a Religion

My parents ate health food in my youth, in the days before Whole Foods was everywhere, when seeking out even a veggie burger could require entering a subculture as exotic as any obscure religious sect. So it made sense that the vegetarian restaurant we frequented had an attached bookstore that mostly sold religious books and spiritual objects, with a New Age vibe but no doctrinal consistency. You could find crucifixes as well as crystals, Christian mysticism alongside astrological charts, Buddhist self-help and Judaica sharing shelf space with Wiccan texts, Bibles cheek by jowl with copies of “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”

My youthful experience wandering in that bookstore of all religions has increasing relevance to where many Americans find themselves today. The long rise of the Nones, Americans with no religious affiliation, has seemingly reached its limit, and a fascination with the numinous shadows our culture once again. Within the intelligentsia there is a wave of notable conversions and a striking nostalgia for belief.

But secularization has created a cohort with little acquaintance with organized religion, for whom the religious quest can feel a bit like entering a store where every faith has its wares on display.

And for such a seeker, the sheer breadth of those options could be a crucial obstacle to religious commitment. It’s one thing to be newly open to the evidence for cosmic design and supernatural possibilities. But it’s harder, in a pluralist society, to pick just one religious option as more likely than all the others to be true.

For the atheist, this difficulty is often invoked as an argument for general disbelief. “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Richard Dawkins has argued. “Some of us just go one god further.” The idea behind this aphorism is that every serious religious worldview is a closed system and that to really practice and believe in one is to necessarily reject all the rest as incredible and false.

Even if it doesn’t prove the case for atheism, this theory still creates a problem for the religious searcher. With so many different options, so many faiths and churches, aren’t you all but guaranteed to get it wrong? If religion isn’t chosen for you, by inheritance or revelation, how can you credibly hope to choose one for yourself?