Question & AnswerJohn Rice from Victor Harbor in South Australia writes:
Question:
Why is it that religions, notably Christianity and Islam, want to convert all non-believers into their particular fold?
Answer:
Dear John,
Religion is part of the human security system that serves to bank the fires of anxiety. This anxiety was born in the breakthrough from consciousness to self-consciousness in our evolutionary journey. It was that breakthrough that made human life as we know it possible. As self-conscious creatures, we embrace questions of meaning and finitude and thus we enter the state of chronic anxiety that marks all human life. Self-conscious human beings also embrace the reality of living in time. When we were merely conscious creatures, we were driven only by our biological needs. Conscious animals are born, eat, grow, reproduce and die in endless cycles. They do not ask whether life has meaning. They do not anticipate or worry about dying. They do not embrace mortality or prepare for coming future events. So it is self-consciousness alone that creates in us human beings that state of chronic anxiety that is alone the hallmark of human life.
We human beings deal with this chronic anxiety in many ways. We use drugs. Animals do not do that. Human beings use caffeine as a stimulus to get us started each day and we use alcohol to slow us down. We use tranquilizers so extensively that we have created a billion dollar pharmaceutical industry to supply our demands. We use tobacco to recreate the security of nursing and we create religion to answer the questions of meaning and mortality. Religion cannot serve this function if it is only “relatively true.” Security demands that religion be made ultimately true with no doubts allowed. That is why the Pope has to be infallible. That is why the claim must be made for the Bible to be inerrant. That is why we assert that our religion is the only “true religion.” It is out of these claims that the need arises for us to impose this “one true faith” on all people. The conversion mentality is simply part of that. In my opinion, this need for security is an aspect of retarded growth in what it means to be human, and the religion that it produces so often seeks to keep us in a state of childlike immaturity.
Beyond this childlike quest for security, I believe we need to discover one other dimension of self-consciousness. It is the one that beckons us to grasp a new maturity. In this dimension of self-consciousness we do not need to be “born again,” we rather need to grow up. Maturity comes not in our constant pretending to be secure, it comes, rather, when we embrace the fact that it is human to be anxious and then to dare to embrace that reality. To live with integrity in a radically insecure world is, I believe, the meaning of the Christian life.
As long as any religion, Christianity and Islam included, believes that it possesses the ultimate truth, it will traffic in security-giving tactics and panaceas. When each religious system recognizes that ultimate truth is not something we possess, but something toward which we walk but never achieve in the human pilgrimage, then a new integrity will come to those traditional faith circles. The need to convert another to my “true religion” will cease. This conversion idea today repels more people than it attracts, a sure sign that it is dying. Whether a new stage of religious maturity is being born to take its place is not quite as clear. That, however, is where the future of Christianity lies.
Thanks for asking.~John Shelby Spong
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