274 religious revolution nowour parents. Th e psychology and the sociology of faith acquire episte-
mological signifi cance; these facts demoralize any believer who is
unwilling to enhance fantasy with self- deception. Insofar as a religion
claims to off er a path to salvation open to all humanity, on the basis of
the revelation and ac cep tance of fundamental and universal truth, it
must not amount to a series of conventional practices and reciprocal
loyalties for which a body of shared doctrines provides only secondary
and accidental cement.
Ye t a ft er the earliest days of Christianity, the overwhelming majority
of Christians, including the overwhelming number of Christian priests,
saints, and theologians, were Christians because their parents were
Christians and because they persisted in the faith of their forefathers.
Th ey were Christians in a world in which, beyond the frontiers of their
countries, most men and women remained non- Christians.
Th e confl ict between the claim to universal truth about universal
salvation and the fact of hereditary infl uence must be acute in a religion
that, like Christianity, severs all connection to national distinction
and history and addresses, as the bearer of that truth, the whole of man-
kind. In such a religion, the subordination of faith to community and
identity is sheer blasphemy: paganism and idolatry disguised as faith.
It is for this reason, before all others, that rationalists and skeptics
who have lived in the civilizations on which the salvation religions set
their mark have wanted to dismiss the claims of these religions to repre-
sent the only truth and the sole road to salvation. Th ey have oft en tried
to reinterpret the central teachings of the religion as circumstantial ex-
pressions of spiritual insights and commitments that can be given many
roughly equivalent expressions in other circumstances.
Such a defl ation of orthodoxy is, however, at war with the nature of
the Semitic monotheisms. How can Christianity be just one way among
many if God became incarnate only once and charged his followers
with establishing one universal church and one sacramental life for all
men and women? To accept the defl ation of the faith recommended by
the ecumenical rationalist is to exchange the house of faith for the half-
way house between belief and disbelief.
Th ere is, I later argue in this chapter, no solution to this problem—
the problem of the actual subservience of religious conviction to the
powers of family, society, and culture— other than a radical shift in the