Interfaithism: Uniting Religions for One World | thebereancall.org

Interfaithism: Uniting Religions for One World

September 6, 2023
Carl Teichrib

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Carl is a researcher, writer, and lecturer focusing on the paradigm shift sweeping the Western world, including the challenges and opportunities faced by Christians. Over the years he has attended a range of internationally significant political, religious, and social events in his quest to understand the historical and contemporary forces of transformation – including the Parliament of the Worlds Religions, Burning Man, and the United Nations Millennium Forum.

Carl’s biases are transparent: he embraces an evangelical Christian perspective, is pro-liberty versus politically imposed equality, pro-individualistic versus consensus collectivism, and pro-free market.

Carl’s website: www.gameofgods.ca

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Transcript:

Carl: Well, good afternoon, everybody! I’m excited to be with you today. It’s going to be a great couple of days, and we are going to be diving into some interesting topics in my power points. You’re going to see that I’ll be dealing today with the Parliament of World Religions, which just took place last week. And so the Parliament ended on Friday, last week Friday, and I visited some friends down in Indianapolis, and then afterwards, on Monday, began the drive across to your part of the US!

And so, today, we’ll be talking about interfaithism, taking a look specifically at the Parliament of World Religions and its influence. 

So, I’m a “boots-on-the-ground” kind of guy. I go to where the action is. One of the things that I took away as a young man, as a young researcher, in terms of trying to understand how the world operates, and I took it away from Dave Hunt, was the importance of (1) Go to the Word of God. For us, that’s our source. And then, when you’re doing research, go to the first source. Go right to the source! Correct? That’s what you do.

And so, I never, ever imagined in my younger life that I would be doing this kind of work. That wasn’t in my vision at all! And so I have no formal training in research work, and I just thought, Well, if you’re engaging in the research, what do you do? You go to the source.

And so today and tomorrow, I’ll be taking you to the source, in the realm of two areas: “Interfaithism,” and then tomorrow “Transformational Culture” specific to the Burning Man community.    

And along the way over the years I have attended oodles and oodles and oodles of events from Wiccan gatherings, to Transhumanist meetings, to the United Nations Millennium Forum. Rarely have I gone as press. I maybe have gone one time as press. That’s right, it would have been one time. The rest has been just simply as somebody who is coming in as an observer.

So, we’re going to jump into a couple of passages to set the stage, to give us a sense of where we need to go, and what we need to consider. Psalm 148 is a beautiful passage. It’s a passage of praise. It’s a passage of recognizing who our Lord and Savior is. And notice how in this passage, God is the same as nature? No! Not at all. Not at all. This is the opposite of what the Apostle Paul was writing about in Romans chapter 1, where “we worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator.” This is the opposite. This is the biblical approach: “Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord from the heavens. Praise Him in the heights above. Praise Him, all His angels. Praise Him, all His heavenly hosts. Praise Him, sun and moon. Praise Him, all you shining stars. Praise Him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for at His command they were created, and He established them forever and ever. He issued a decree that will never pass away. Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures, and all the depths: fire and hail, snow and clouds, stormy wind fulfilling His Word. Mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars. Beasts and all cattle.”

(Do you get the point? Yes! Awesome!)  “Creeping things and flying fowl, Kings of the earth, and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, both young men and maidens, old men and children—let them praise the name of the Lord, for His name alone is exalted. His glory is above the earth and heaven!”

Beautiful passage. Powerful passage! It reminds us that the God we serve is other than creation. He is outside of creation. 

Last week when I was at the Parliament of World Religions, and it fits with this passage, I had a conversation with a pagan individual. And this passage kind of hits me as I’m reading it. He’s the one who commands! He’s the one who created! And I talked to this pagan, and I said to the person (because the person had acknowledged me as “divine.” Sometimes these things happen when we’re in these settings), “Don’t put that burden on me, please! I did not create the oak leaf outside. I did not make one blade of grass. I can’t even make the dirt that I walked on. Who are you to say that I am divine or that you are divine? God alone is exalted because He is the Creator—literally the author of life and the One who defeats death. No one else has that authority. It is exclusive to Him.”

And then we see the supremacy of Jesus Christ: “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth. Visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him, and He is before all things and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fulness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself by Him, whether things on earth, or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.” This is our Lord and Savior. He is exclusive in His claim. He is exclusive in His power. He is the one who creates all things, and He is the Firstborn—that is, He has the pre-eminence. He has the highest position. He is the firstborn over all. 

So, as we consider interfaithism, we need to recognize that scripture is both inclusive and exclusive. I have some people who go, “Inclusive? Inclusive?” Yes! It is. There’s an interesting kind of juxtaposition here. In 1 Peter:3:9, it says, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise as some count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” 

He wants the world to come! He wants His creation to bow down and recognize Him as Creator. He wants, He desires, that. We read that in 2 Peter. So He’s inclusive! “Come, come! Please come!” But He’s exclusive, because He is the Author of life and the one who defeats death. It is His rule. It is His way. And that actually only makes logical sense, because nobody in this room, and nobody in the entire history of humanity could repeat that. 

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begottenSon, that whoever believes in Him [and we know this passage] should not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s an exclusive claim! 

John:14:6: “And Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Again, that exclusive claim. 

Acts:4:12: “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” 

You notice, there’s no wiggle room here? There is no wiggle room! He’s not saying, “By your good works you can save yourself!” He’s not saying, “Go join the priesthood!” He’s not saying    any of these things! He’s not saying it’s even through your experiences. It is completely on Him. You trust Him. That is what we do. We trust Him. Just as the thief on the cross could do nothing except trust on the One dying beside him, period. End of story. 

So He is both inclusive and exclusive. 

Now, I need to bring this into play, and I bring this into play in most of my presentations because it’s so important. It is fundamental to where our world is at, and it is fundamental for us as Christians to wrestle with, and that is there are only really truly two worldviews. And Dr. Peter Jones from Truth Exchange, I give him credit in being able to wrestle through this and build a model to work on, puts it in the sense of oneism vs twoism. 

So in oneism, and that is the globally dominant position, God, man, and nature are all essentially the same. That is the pagan worldview. That is the view of the occult. That is the view of Eastern religions. It is even the view, really, if you boil it down to its essence, the view of atheism and secular humanism, because it says there is no God outside of man. Man is all we have in terms of the knowledge of a higher intelligence. There is no outside personality. So oneism is the dominant worldview. 

The biblical perspective, however, is not. It’s not dualism, this idea of opposite light and darkness, opposite good and evil. No, it’s twoism: God separate, exalted, holy, distinct. And then creation. You understand that dynamic, now you have a position where you can begin to have conversations with people like at the Parliament of World Religions. Like the pagans down the street. Like the folks you’re gonna run into at Walmart or McDonalds, because they’re all around us. 

The world is entrapped in this idea of oneness. And how you view one or two will determine so many of your thoughts and positions on things like philosophy, religion, gender and sexuality. 

Folks, if you want to understand today’s gender revolution, sexual revolution, it lands squarely on this question: is reality one or two? If it’s one, binary ceases to exist. Just simply float in and float out of whatever your gender feels like for the day, because there are no values that are firmly entrenched or placed, even within your genetic makeup. So this is a big deal, a really big deal.

So is there oneism in the Bible? You bet. The very first problem that we encounter in Genesis:3:5: “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like or as God, knowing good and evil.” And here we have this sense of the divinity of man. We are fundamentally now no different than our Creator. That is what the creation is saying. We want to transgress God’s laws, and in the process of doing this, we transform ourselves.

Then Genesis:11:4, we see this now being done collectively in the Babel account where we come together to build and to push God out and say, “We build this together, we do this in unity. We build our own order. We construct heaven on earth.” 

And then in Romans:1:25, Paul brings about the concept of the lie, and that flips us right back around to Genesis 3, that we exchanged the truth of God for this lie and worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator. And so now there’s an exchange of purpose.

So interfaithism–interfaithism is a sense of spiritual politics. It is the idea of oneness in action through our various religious experiences coming together to say, “We all share a common spiritual encounter, a similar belief system, a similar experience, and that is the betterment of man, that we can transcend ourselves, that we can now move on and we can build a better world.”

Interfaithism is about, at the global level, change. It is an ideology of change, and it says all “authentic religions,” or “authentic faiths,” and I have that in quotations because at the 2023 Parliament last week, that is how Michael Beckwith from the New Thought Movement, that is how he couched it. He framed it this way: authentic faiths. I’ve never heard that before within the interfaith context, and I’ve been to many interfaith events. We’re all of a sudden… now we’re seeing a distinction between the idea of all religions being essentially true to saying, “Oh, maybe there’s some that just don’t quite fit the mold.” Guess which one that is? Oh, you’ll see. You’ll see. 

And so in interfaithism, it’s this sense that in our solidarity, we can now build heaven on earth, and we can transcend and reshape cultural, political, even economic norms. It all changes. So the main talking points during the course of the week are things like this: climate change, sustainable development, empowering the United Nations, LGBTQ, and all about saving “Mother Earth.” You hear this over and over again.

So I’m going to give you a couple of other examples of interfaithism just to kind of set the tone as we go into the Parliament experience. Who here heard about this, the Abrahamic Family House? Yep, good! Quite a few hands. I thought there may be more, but that’s okay. I know that in this past year as the Abrahamic Family House was being constructed and then opened–I think it opened in February and March and it’s located in Abu Dhabi, there was a lot of talk within the Christian community, especially floating around on social media, Christians all of a sudden going, “What is this? What’s going on?” Here we have in the Middle East a mosque, a synagogue, and a church all being constructed on the same piece of property, all of them coming together to say that we can share this common ground, and that we can work together for understanding and education and peace, and we can even worship here. And of course it started with the 2019 document Human Fraternity penned and signed by Pope Francis and major Muslim leaders. And then from that point it created this concept or this idea that, well, now we can live this out in reality here in Abu Dhabi. And so the Abrahamic Family House was born. That’s one example of interfaith work at the global level. 

Another example is an event I attended back in 2010 in my province’s capital city of Winnipeg, and it was the G8 World Religions Summit. Now, did you know that the G8 has a religious component to it, or the G20, that is has a religious element? Most Christians don’t. Most Christians think that, oh, my goodness! The G8 leaders are meeting, or the G20 national leaders are meeting, and it’s all about politics! But at the same time, at the same time, there are religious leaders gathering within an interfaith kind of a container to flesh out and work through policy ideas to bring forward to our national leaders to say, “These are where the faith leaders would like you to go.” Very interesting.

So at this event, we were told that there is not only one way, there are many ways, and that we are called to serve this God we know by so many names. 

So who attended? What religions were represented? Well, the typical course of actors that you would see at an event like this: the Baha’i International community, Indigenous and Pagan spirituality, there was some representation from Judaism, Hindus, the Sikh community, Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation was represented, the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and the World Council of Religions for Peace. By far the largest, largest representation came from us, from the Christian community. We were the ones in many respects setting the tone. So this is just the list–I’m not gonna read the list–of those Christians groups, or groups that would fall underneath that Christian umbrella, who participated directly. And for myself as a Canadian, I found it quite troubling when I see some names that are very familiar in my setting, like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, or the Canadian Food Grains Bank, and, you know, the list kind of goes on, and we kind of shake our head, going, “What's happening?”

So this is some of the–these are some of the discussion points:

We need to have religious unity for the common good and for world peace, because we have this problem of religious wars. Don’t you know that war has been caused by religion? Religion is the greatest cause of human suffering. 

Who here has heard that? Have you ever questioned the assumptions behind it? Do. World War I: 7,000 men died a day for four years in World War I. Was it a war between religions? No. No. It was about political control.

Russian Revolution under Lenin: roughly 7 million died in the span of a handful of years. Was it sikhs against Catholics? No. 

World War II: doesn’t quite meet the mark, does it?

The Vietnam War, Korea, which ones? How about the genocides that happened during the last 100 years? How about Pol Pot’s Killing Field? Roughly 35-40 percent of Cambodians wiped out in the space of two and a half years. What was that about? Was that religious?

If you want to claim that all belief systems are a form of religion, I guess we could argue that. But if we want to use the traditional idea of what religion looks like, then no, it’s not!

Stalin…how about Mao Zedong? How about the deaths that have occurred over the last 100 years? Does it fit this idea of religion as the cause of war and suffering and conflict? It falls short. And if you take a look through my book Game of Gods, I have a section where I actually compare genocides and wars over the last 100 years. And it’s remarkable, because all of a sudden the argument that religion–and when they say religion, they’re primarily meaning you guys are the cause of wars and suffering. That argument falls far short. Of course there are religious conflicts; there are places where religion does play a role, no question. But when it comes to the big numbers, the really big numbers, we don’t really touch it.

So nevertheless, that becomes the argument, the position to hold as we say religions need to come together for world peace. And now we can come together then and work for social justice, and that spiritual leaders have similar and sometimes have more power than national governments. This really hit home at this event when all of a sudden religious leaders are going, “You know something? The government of Canada only has jurisdiction within the boundaries of Canada. The US government only has jurisdiction within its principal region of jurisdiction. As religious leaders, our faith groups can sometimes–in fact, often–transcend borders.” Think of the Catholic Church; think of the Anglican Church; think of the Lutheran community; think of the Mennonite community; it absolutely does transcend borders. So the realization was all of a sudden, Oh! We have clout. In fact, we have a tremendous amount of influence. And so it was that recognition that we transcend governments. 

The other arguments that were being made was that we need some form of global financial governance, including a world taxation system, that it’s about a new economic order. The Salvation Army representative said, “It’s not about having a bike for each, it’s about learning to share one bicycle in community!” No, thank you! We have tried that, it was called the Soviet Union, and it sucked. We don’t want that. 

Lots of talk of eco-justice, having a gospel of respect for nature, and that capitalists must pay our eco-debts, and that religions need to unite for a massive vision quest to save Mother Earth, and in all of this we need to empower the United Nations, because there needs to be some type of management system. And faith leaders become the new planetary statesmen.

So, in a handful of days, the next G20 forum, interfaith forum, is taking place, and it’s gonna be happening in India. Roughly 2,000 people are expected for this event as faith leaders come together to talk about what policies national governments should be prepared to take in their quest to make a more united world.

Oh, folks, there’s lots of stuff that goes on. Lots and lots of stuff.

So now, let me take you to the Parliament, and we’re gonna rest on the Parliament for the bulk of the rest of this presentation, because it is that important. The Parliament of the World Religions is the primary global example of interfaithism. To give you a little bit of a sense of its history, it started in 1893, and I’m not going to go through this list, but if you want to screenshot it, capture it, whatever you want, take a picture of it, this gives you a snapshot of what has transpired. So 1893, it happened in Chicago, and it was part of the Columbian Exposition. It was the first time when the East came and met the West, and it really was a tipping point for a new way of thinking about the world, and we’ll be talking about that in a few minutes. 

It took 100 years, however, to kind of catch up on itself and have the second Parliament, again in Chicago in 1993. And then there’s been a number of subsequent Parliaments ever since, including during the Covid period when it went virtual. And I give the folks who set that up…I definitely give them kudos for the work that they did. It’s difficult to pull together, as you folks know, a virtual conference. Somehow these individuals were able to pull together a conference that brought out 3,000 people onto their virtual platform with over 500 working sessions (remarkable!) during that time of Covid.

And then of course, last week yours truly was in Chicago for the latest installment of the Parliament. 

So let’s go to 1893, because that’s where it begins, and that’s where we have to kind of focus on for a few moments. What was hoped for at the 1893 Parliament? Well, it comes through in their statements. It comes through in their official records. So this was the original proposal for the 1893 Parliament. It would be a Parliament of Nations that would surpass all previous efforts to bring about a real fraternity of nations and unite the enlightened people of the whole earth in a general cooperation for the attainment of the great ends for which human society is organized. That was the great idea: the world now needs to come together! The world now needs to work in unity! We will bring about a fraternity of nations. And then Tennyson’s famous poem, Locksley Hall, became the unofficial motto for the Parliament: 

“Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.”

So you already get a taste of where this is going. This is 130 years ago.

Two statements from the Parliament really kind of bring home what the hope was, the ideal. Pardon me…“This day the sun of a new era of religious peace and progress rises over the world. This day a new flower blooms in the gardens of religious thought. This day a new fraternity is born into the world of human progress, to aid in the upbuilding of the kingdom of God in the hearts of men. It is the brotherhood of religions.”

Fairly bold statement.

And then, “The religion of the future will be universal in every sense. It will embody all the thoughts and aspirations and virtues and emotions of all humanity. It will draw together all lands and peoples and kindreds and tongues into a universal brotherhood of love and service. It will establish upon earth a heavenly order.”

It’s Babel. This is just simply a return to Babel. The shadows of it still fall on us today, and the 1893 Parliament really helped to bring that concept forward for a new era.

So the 1893 Parliament is considered to be literally the tipping point in a new way of thinking. As I said, it was the point where the East came West, primarily through this man, Swami Vivekananda, who traveled to the Parliament and actually got there early and ended up at the train station a little bit bewildered. He came from India. He wasn’t quite sure where to go or who he should be meeting. And as he was at the train station, sitting there, a well-known and well-positioned lady of Chicago walked by and saw Swami Vivekananda and took him underneath her arms. And Swami Vivekananda became the darling of Chicago’s socialite community. He became the darling of America’s intellectual and social class after the Parliament, as Swami Vivekananda traveled across the US giving lectures and having talks with very influential people. 

So at the Parliament, this is what Swami Vivekananda said: “Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Ye are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings.” 

Really? Really?? Perfect? Yeah, I don’t know about you folks, but I have a hard time getting up in the morning, you know? So much for perfection, right? I’ve got to wear glasses… It kind of reminds me many, many moons ago I was at a public presentation that the Dalai Lama of Tibet was giving in Bloomington, Indiana. It was during what was called the Kalachakra ceremony, and he was giving his lectures before the ceremony took place, and it was in 1999, right before the turn of the millennium, and he was describing how he was not afraid of what would transpire with Y2K, or he was not afraid of what was going to transpire with the change over to a new century, because he had seen centuries come and go. He had seen millenniums come and go. Well, that’s a God statement, isn’t it? That’s a divine statement. But in the same breath, so to speak, he talked about the problem of his poor eyesight, his bad skin condition, and he had secret service all around him. And I thought to myself, Golly, if I had bought you at the “god store,” I’d return you as defective! 

[audience laughs]

And it’s funny because it’s true. And then when Carl Teichrib looks in the mirror, he goes, “I’d do the same with you, buddy, because you’re defective, too.” We all are, aren’t we? So, so much for this: we are “holy and perfected beings”? Mm-mm. Not even close. We are broken and sinful creatures who need Jesus Christ. 

At the Parliament, 78 percent of the speakers, almost 80 percent, came from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox church backgrounds, making this an historic ecumenical event. The social gospel movement which gave us today’s emergent and now progressive Christian movement had, certainly, a platform at that event along with its concept of a righteous internationalism. And all this became foundational to that milieu, that context of building a world federation, and even the idea of the League of Nations as now church groups–primarily social gospel ministers directly were involved in the formation of the League of Nations. So there’s some really interesting interlocks now between religion and politics at the international level. We’re building heaven on earth, don’t you know? That’s what this is about. Why would you oppose that? And all of this, it shifted the West towards pluralism and it launched the modern interfaith movement. It is the tipping point.

So I’ve had the opportunity of being a part of four Parliaments–2015, 2018, and then the virtual Parliament in 2021, and then of course last week. So we’re gonna dive into this a bit. I’ll take you to all of these to some extent.

So this is the 2015 Parliament in Salt Lake City. This is the opening. We have shamans walking in. It’s a carnival atmosphere. It is a zoo of religions as we have multitudes of different spiritual traditions and faiths converging in one place. And yes, the Church of Latter Day Saints was there. In fact, not only were they there at that event, but at this one I was just at, they were listed as one of the official sponsors, which was remarkable! The 2015 Parliament, however, was sponsored by a very large interfaith Saudi-based Muslim-Catholic organization. So…interesting bedfellows. 

So it starts off with starting a sacred fire, and this is from the agenda book from the 2015 event: “The sacred fire is lit at the sunrise ceremony on the first day. It then burns continuously, watched over by firekeepers and ceremony helpers until the end of the gathering, and then is left to burn until it extinguishes itself. It is believed that a sacred fire holds open a direct connection to the creator, Mother Earth, the spirit world, and our ancestors as we convene.”

The 2015 Parliament had a very strong emphasis on the importance of women. And so we had a hallway dedicated to the goddess in all her various manifestations. And we were told often that you were Mother Earth walking, you are a shakti, you are divine, you are a divine priestess. This is very common throughout the 2015 event. 

And then it had the Red Tent Temple, and the Red Tent Temple…oops! Sorry. The Red Tent Temple was considered to be the womb of the Parliament. Yeah. Because it’s here where we venerate, ladies, your sacred monthly flow. I kid you not. So for the course of the event, there’s workshops taking place, there are ceremonies, there’s rituals. As ladies, you can now get in touch with your divine feminine side, that you are indeed Mother Earth walking, and your flow  shows that through your ability to bring forth life. 

Brian MacLaren was a speaker at 2015. He was a speaker during the climate plenary. 

By the way, if Brian MacLaren can be a speaker at the climate plenary, anybody can be a speaker at the climate plenary, because he’s not a climatologist as far as I know! What was interesting was one of the other plenary speakers was one of the high imams from the mosque in Mecca. So just to give you a sense of, now, how the conversation goes.

But this is what Brian MacLaren told us during the climate plenary: “I don’t know which comes first–do I love creation because I love the Creator, or do I love God because I can’t help but love the fish, and the trees, and the birds, and the mountains, and the fresh air? I don’t know which comes first.” Wow! “But I know that the two go inextricably together. Brothers and sisters, the earth is singing to us. The earth is crying to us. The earth is groaning to us.”

Is there any fundamental difference between this and the pagan perspective? Come on. Don’t we know our Scripture? This is Romans 1 being lived out. We’re confused. 

So one of the workshops I attended asked the question, “Are we really all one?” Really fantastic question. And it began with the moderator asking all of us to go into a quiet place. And as we are meditating, then to just, when we’re done, shout out a word or a phrase that exhibits our “aha!” moment within our religious experience. And so in a few minutes, people were shouting out, “Peace!” “Unity!” “Wholeness!” “Joy!” “Love!” And the moderator stopped us and said, “Listen to yourselves! We have Buddhists and Christians and Wiccans and Hindus and Jews, and you’re all saying the same thing. See? It doesn’t matter what you believe. It doesn’t matter what your doctrine is. It’s what you experience.” 

So be very careful when it comes to experiences. I’ve experienced things, you’ve experienced things, but do our experiences become the foundation upon where our truth claims rest? No, because my experiences change day to day. Some days I’m on top of the world, some days you can just, like, you know, shove me in the closet, lock the door and walk away. Probably the best thing for me! Right? You folks as well. You all get it. Your experiences will take you all kinds of different directions. Your feelings don’t dictate your truth. Period. They’re important, but they don’t dictate ultimate truth. 

So with that in mind, this is what he told all of us in the room: “I am you. You are me. It is at that level of unification and oneness that we wanted to address this morning, and it’s not to be found just in reasoning or in dialogue, it’s to be found in the direct experience. To see the divinity in other people, that is a wonderful thing. It is on the level of direct experience where you perceive the divinity in ourselves and in other people, and not just to think about it, that true oneness is to be found, and this is not just an intellectual construct, but there’s practical reality because it’s in transcending that usual source of identity and identification that we awaken to the divinity within ourselves. So that acting from compassion and acting from care and concern for others and the planet does not have to be an effort, because we see the divinity in all things.”

And so one of the things that our little team encountered was this gentleman, just to give you a sense of how spiritual the place can be, because this is a spiritual issue. And so as we’re walking through the exhibition area, this father stops us, this Hindu guru, and he says, “I want to do an experiment with you.” And so he gives us all cards, little pieces of paper and pencils and pens, and says, “Write anything you want.” And he takes his daughter and his daughter’s friend and puts them on a chair, puts cotton balls over their eyes, wraps their eyes, then puts a mask over their eyes, and then wraps their eyes and wraps their head with scarves so they cannot see. Now, they’re not far away on a stage. We are in their space. I can get down on my hands and knees and see, “Can I look up and see if you’re peeking somehow?” And then they would each take the card and read word for word anything that we wrote on it. So I wrote down John:14:6: “Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” And they read it word perfect. At one point, the father flips the card upside down and backwards and the girl has a hard time reading it, and eventually she just says, “I think it’s backwards.” We had the opportunity later to ask those two girls, “How? How? How did you do this? I mean, how?” And they just simply said, “We have been involved in very intensive yoga for years, every day, and we have opened up our crown chakra, our third eye, and now we can see spiritually into the physical.” There is a spiritual reality. There really, truly is. 

So let me take you to the 2018 Parliament before we dive into what happened over the last few days. So 2018, the theme was the promise of inclusion, the power of love. Sounds fantastic. And I’m gonna skip the video…I have a two-minute video, but I think I’m gonna skip it for the sake of time. And these are some of those–some of the individuals who were involved. You don’t need to read through the list, but you just, as you scan it, you’re going to recognize power player, power player, power player, UN official, UN official, advisor, advisor. These aren’t just religious leaders. This is where the United Nations, the World Bank, and the international community also come together. This is where you have national leaders who converge with religious and spiritual leaders. 

A few pictures from the Parliament. We had a labyrinth that you could go to and discover your divinity within after you’ve traveled through the labyrinth to the center. We had a Red Tent Temple. There was a peace dance that just kind of broke out, and I took a picture of that. And then we had energy healers who were able to apparently heal you from a bit of a distance. All kinds of interesting things you will encounter at the Parliament, as there are literally hundreds of exhibitors and booths and individuals who every step of the way want to talk to you about their religious traditions. 

Jim…pardon me, Jim Wallace of Sojourners was one of the keynote speakers for the opening session. And it fit with what we were hearing with the rest of the event. The rest of the event was–we were told over and over again there’s no room for exclusive truth claims, the separating faith or the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as divisive, nationalism is the greatest threat, free market is an immoral scourge on society, and that you are a supremacist. And Jim Wallace in his opening talk, it was right before the US midterm elections, described this as a battle between “angels and demons,” and those who support Trump are demons, and the evangelicals have sold themselves out for power. So raw was his rhetoric that in some of our discussions with a few of the volunteers at the Parliament, we asked them, “So what did you think of Jim Wallace’s opening address?” And they’re like, “Oh, you know, I agree, but oh, it was a little bit cringey.” Because it doesn’t really fit this idea of inclusion, or love. 

[audience laughs]

And just to demonstrate the inclusion and the love that was there, here’s a Baptist minister and all week long she had worked on a Buddhist sand mandala of the deity Kali in the Hindu tradition, the deity of destruction and death with the severed head of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, and those who confirmed Kavanaugh, their severed heads around Kali’s belt. 

And then at the end of it, we watched–and I have the video, because I taped the whole thing. You have to be able to document this stuff. I mean, who’s gonna believe you?–as they did a dance invocation to Kali to bring forth destruction and justice against Justice Kavanaugh and the Trump administration. Love. Inclusion. 

And then the problem of what to do with evangelicals, and one of the workshops, it was all about how to reach exclusivists. You are an exclusivist. So these are just a few of the snapshots from the slides that were being shown to the folks in the room, that we are the greatest challenge that the interfaith community is pressed with: how to bring evangelicals into the fold. How are we gonna do this? We’re outside of it.

So here’s a few of the notes–some of the takeaways from that workshop, and it’s specific about how as an interfaith activist, I need to go to churches and infiltrate. So when I, as an interfaith activist, want to engage with an evangelical church, I don’t approach the lead pastor. Instead, spend time building a relationship with the youth leader or the associate pastor. Very important. Then frame the interfaith agenda within the acceptable language of social justice, community development, those kinds of things. And then leverage Bible verses in a way that appeals to that sense of love and acceptance. And then finally, have that younger junior pastor meet with his equivalent from one other faith only–don’t mix it up with too many, not until you have a solid relationship built, and you begin to break down that barrier in that evangelical church. Because if they can say “yes” to another faith, they can eventually say “yes” to more faiths, and you’ll eventually have them within the interfaith fold. 

So quickly, the 2021 Parliament, I won’t go into it much at all, except to say that it’s all about compassion, and it didn’t matter what faith you were a part of–if you were Christian, or a Hindu, or a Seikh, or a Wiccan, you are all saying the exact same thing. It was like, “Here’s your talking points, people! Say the same thing!” ‘Cause they did.

Covid demonstrated our interdependence, we need to build up the United Nations and empower it as our moral voice, nationalism is over, get over yourselves, what we need is a form of righteous internationalism, and we are all one.  

And that brings us around to last week–Chicago: The Parliament of the World Religions. 

And so the theme for last week’s Parliament was Defending Freedom and Human Rights: A Call to Conscience. And as we talk about what freedom and human rights looks like in this context, you’re gonna all of a sudden have to start thinking, Hmm, if I held up a mirror to what they were saying, I think I’d come to the conclusion that they themselves are against freedom and human rights.

So these are just a few of the speakers. By the way, if anybody wants to come and take a look at the agenda book for the week… You know, I was one of the early Christian researchers in transhumanism, and if I could find a way to clone myself like, a hundred times so I could go to all these events, I would! We only had a team of–I think we had, what, 12 people at the Parliament–12 against 6500? Not bad odds. But…

[audience laughs]

…here we go! These are some of the speakers: 

Blase Cupich from the Archdiocese of Chicago. He’s a cardinal. At the 2018 Parliament, he was talking about what we need to do is come together as one world with one plan.

Marianne Williamson, unity leader, New Thought leader, and the US presidential candidate under the Democrat ticket. 

We had the United Nations Secretary General give us greetings through a video feed, then Congressman Bobby Rush. 

Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson was…he gave a rousing speech. 

Nancy Pelosi finished it off with a video presentation. 

Charles McNeill from UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program. In fact, this is the Parliament and UNEP’s document entitled Faith for Earth: A Call for Action. This is Romans 1 in a very real way. 

Rabbi David Rosen from the Abrahamic Family House was there. The list goes on! Shane Claiborne, progressive evangelical. Michael Beckwith, New Thought leader. Richard Rohr…I’m not sure if you folks know who Richard Rohr is, but he’s a Franciscan contemplative mystic. And so I went to his talk. He was a part of a panel talking about how the church, and how religions, but specifically the church, the Christian church, will have to be trained in the importance of having spiritual experiences through psychedelics, because that is the trajectory. And how we need to begin teaching and training seminaries and professors and Bible colleges, and specifically seminaries towards thinking through spirituality from a psychedelic perspective. 

One of the workshops I attended, and just to give you a sense of what the political side looks like, was on faith-based divestment from fossil fuels. So in the picture we have Karenna Gore, Al Gore’s daughter. We have a member of the Islamic Society of North America, actually a leading figure within the Islamic Society of North America. The primary investment officer from the Presbyterian Church USA. I didn’t even know that churches did global investments, had global investment portfolios! I found that out–a number of them do! And we’re talking about multiple billions of dollars that came through in spades! We’re talking about huge amounts of economic leverage. 

So these are the ones who are part of this working session on divesting, and how now as denominations, as schools, as institutions, we can divest in petroleum, and in their words, shut down the industry now. We need to educate faith groups on climate change and petroleum divestment. We need to network with other investment groups and global players, and the Rockefellers were specifically mentioned, that they had already been involved in partnerships to stop oil. And it was like, hmm, didn’t the Rockefellers get their wealth from oil? That, we were told–in fact, that question did come up–that, we were told, is okay, because that’s in the past. We’ll take their money, but now we’re gonna go after, you know, the investment in fossil fuels today.

A lot of push–and this is something to kind of have on your radar–a push within the United Nations to create a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty that would end fossil fuel explorations worldwide. That was being discussed. And they also talked about how they were targeting and squeezing banks. And they were making very specific cases on how to divest out of the petroleum industry. And then the Islamic representative talked about how we were already starting to change and use Sharia law to impact sovereign wealth funds, the idea being that we will be able to economically disrupt the industry. And the framing was that we are causing the death of a powerful global multi-headed Goliath. I’m sorry, you take away fossil fuels, and we will go back to the dark ages. Period.

I had a brief conversation with a climate change activist. They had a booth set up. They had a billboard with four categories. On one side of the billboard was, “I’m very concerned, very, very, very worried about climate change. Very, very worried,” which is everybody. And then “Somewhat worried,” and then, “Somewhat not worried,” and then “Not worried at all.” And you could put a sticker on where you stood. And of course, the “I am so, so frightened” side was just loaded with stickers, and that progressively got less and less until there’s just a handful on the “I’m not worried at all.” So I took a sticker, and he’s watching me, and I walk over–this is right after the divestment workshop–and I stick it on–pbbt!–the far right side. Actually, quite literally! That was the far right side! No, I’m not worried one bit. And he was aghast! “Don’t you know what’s going on? Don’t you know?” I’m like, “Buddy, I’ve been going to global events since ‘97, and I can’t tell you how many workshops I’ve been in, and how many discussions I’ve been a part of, including with climatologists who are both for this and a handful that say, ‘Mm, no, it doesn’t really…the model doesn’t really work.’ How many times I’ve been in these circles? It’s politics. It’s economics. Period.” 

And then I told him I’m building an off-grid cabin out in the bush–and I am; and I sent some pictures your way, Tom, over the last little while. And it’s run with 14.5 kilowatts of solar panels. And he goes, “Oh!” Sounds like a yo-yo, had him on a string. He was like, “Oh, very good!” I’m like, “No, very bad!” “What?” “Because coal and natural gas are essential to fuse the components of those solar cells. You take away coal and petroleum, no more solar panels. Period. Gone.” And he was just quiet. Well, how…what are you gonna do, right? Sorry, this is your cult. This is your faith.

I got off on a rabbit trail, I’m sorry about that.

So, a few just different pictures. Yes, sacred green teachings from all the different religions. Here’s the Red Tent Temple. There was a lady healing others. Oh, it’s a carnival. So what faith is this? What faith is this? Because it didn’t matter if you were a Buddhist or a Wiccan or a Seikh or a Christian. You’re all saying the same thing. The faith is oneness. The faith is Romans 1, that we will serve and worship creation instead of our Creator. That is the faith. And you can keep your diversity of experiences, and even your diversity of teachings as long as you come together in the unity of this. And that’s where we’re at. 

So freedom, human rights… the whole week. And if you want to go through the working sessions, you’ll see it. This is what we were told…and I’m a Canadian. I can’t vote Republican or Democrat. It makes zero difference for me! I’ve got enough problems on my side of the border, trust me! 

[audience laughs]

But we are told that Trump is the closest thing to an Antichrist. Really? Really? We had workshops where we talked about the problem of rightwing misinformation, how conservative AM radio has damaged democracy, how Twitter is basically the front piece or the front center for hate. The problem is the White Christian Nationalists, and that Russia, Putin, has become the leader of the Christian Right. Can’t get past that narrative, can we? The Christian Right is connected to Russian disinformation. And then over and over again that the Christian Right supports authoritarian rulers, despots, and fascism. 

Folks, that’s very telling, and this is what I have observed in doing this kind of research for already a few decades–coming on almost three. That’s crazy! At one point, the interfaith language, when they would discuss evangelicals, would be “You’re fundamentalists.” Okay, I can live with that. We can make that work. We can have a conversation. We still have a point of discussion. And then we became extremists and exclusivists. Hmm. It’s getting a little bit further away now to actually sit down and have a conversation. It’s still there, but it’s a little bit further off now. Then 2018 we became supremacists, and at that point you’re really starting to cut things pretty close. And then this one, over and over ad nauseum, we are authoritarians. At that point you’re going, all right, you have “othered” us. Tremendously “othered” us. What is this going to look like in the near to midterm?

So it’s okay though if you want to take a seat at the global table as Christians. And Christians are there–not in the sense that you and I are thinking of, but they are there engaged and trying to have a place at the global table. 

So one example is the 2021 virtual Parliament. There was a workshop on the John:14:6 Project–here is from the description: “The exclusivity of this verse continues to be a malignancy on Christian theology and proclamation, further rendering authentic dialogue with the other faith traditions very difficult. All who share an openness to discuss the problematic nature of John:14:6 are invited to join the conversation.”

Let me read you from, and I thank Don Veinot–he actually called me right before our conference began and said, “Carl, Carl, you need to read on page 192 Interfaith Dialogue with Christianity,” [we missed that workshop, because that was the workshop that Don and the rest of our little group… we were all going to Richard Rohr’s talk on psychedelics]. 

But here we go: Interfaith Dialogue–Intra-faith Dialogue within Christianity. Allow me to read this to you. It’s the description, and the person leading the workshop was a Lutheran pastor who works with churches on interfaith and interfaith dialogues. “‘Interreligious dialogue is today unavoidable,’ wrote Raimon Pannikkar in the Interreligious Dialogue. He also said, ‘If interreligious Dialogue is to be real dialogue, then interreligious dialogue must accompany it. Within Christianity, that dialogue must address the elephant in our living room: Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation.’ Hans Kohn famously said, ‘No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions,’ adding, ‘No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundation of the religions.’ This interactive session is designed to help participants explore difficult foundational passages and teachings and find alternatives to the pervasive exclusivist interpretations of Christianity. While the session is designed from a Christian point of view, those of all traditions are welcome to join in and share their experiences of intrafaith challenges in their own traditions.”

That’s right. We need to rewrite those problematic little Bible verses. What is this all about, as we begin to wind this down? Salvation. It is truly an alternative salvation claim. Don’t kid yourself: this is spiritual politics, and it has a salvation message. It has its own eschatology. The end of the world will come with a great big flash of global warming, and the sea levels will rise, and we have–we have our own priest class! We even had worship music, and I kid you not, I got lots of videos. We even have our own holy texts and sacred works such as the Global Ethic and the Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Charter. It is a faith–a faith in man.

So at the end of the 2018 Parliament, Larry Greenfield, the executive director, said this to all of us who were in the room: “Thanks to all those who are committed to the salvation of the earth!” So when you think about politics in this way, all of a sudden you realize, Oh, we really do have only two worldviews! One is either creation saves itself, or we trust our Creator. That’s really what this boils down to. It does become as simple as that, though it is not simplistic. 

So we do have a team of people who go to the Parliament of World Religions and to other events, as well. There’s not a lot of us. I would love to have you come with us, because every 10 feet you can have a conversation with somebody from a different faith. Sometimes those conversations are short and really good, or just, you know, a challenge, and sometimes they’re long and extensive. But it’s important. And again, we had, I think, 12 people. So this is our little group on the top. We have four missing. That was the best picture we could get, because Bill Honsberger kept putting a copy of my book in front of his face, and we were like, “Bill, put your hand down! We gotta take this picture!” and it was like herding cats. We were all guilty of that! And then the rest of the picture is in the bottom–Bill Honsberger from Haven Ministries out of Colorado. This is 2018–2018 Don Veinot with my friends Brian and Audrey. They’re coming with me to Burning Man in a couple of days. That’s at the 2018 Parliament–2015 on the top. We’re just having conversations. 

Guess what? They’re not scary people. They’re just people. Period. They are your brothers and sisters in Adam, and we desire that they become our brothers and sisters in Christ. And so we have real conversations. It’s kind of like guerilla evangelism, but it’s amazing what kind of talks you can have. Sometimes it’s very, very simple. I was at the cosmic mass along with Bill and a few others from our team. The cosmic mass–I got videos if you ever want to see it. There’s bread, there’s wine, there’s communion. There’s a restructuring of the Lord’s Prayer as we worship the cosmic mother and Jesus Christ is just an office that you can all attain. You are divine. And we’re standing in the back just watching this all unfold, and this lady during one part of the ceremony where we were supposed to go to different individuals and ask about, “What is sacred for you?” This lady comes up to me and I’m like… oh my, I’m backed against the corner here. And she comes up to me and she says, “Let’s talk.” “Okay. Absolutely. Ladies first.” Awesome–gentleman, you can always use that: ladies first. And so she just spills about, you know, the cosmic Christ and her own divinity, blah blah blah. Same stuff over and over again. And I just said to her, because we only had like 30 seconds apiece before we had to change things up, I just said to her, “I have something totally different to tell you.” And so in 30 seconds, I went into oneism and twoism: the Creator of the universe, Yahweh, is distinct and different, and that I am not divine and you are not divine. That I am sinful, and you’re sinful. I’m a failure. You’re a failure. Let’s be honest about this. And I went into it. And when I was done, she was just quiet. Now, she was in her 80s, and she was from Delaware. She was just quiet and she looked at me and she said, “I have never heard this in my life.” And I am having more conversations with her! It’s not difficult sometimes. 

At one point we were supposed to go and greet each other, “Namaste, the divine within me sees the divine within you.” And again, we were all kind of–our little team is against the corner, and you only have like, seconds, sometimes just seconds. I had three ladies come to me and do this. I mean, you know, again, ladies first! “The divine within you…” and I said, “I will tell you something different.” And in one case I put my hand on the lady’s shoulder, and I looked her in the eyes, and I said, “I see your humanity, and that you are a daughter of Eve.” And it was like watching them break right there. And it was really cool! Really, really cool. Because for a minute, just a minute, a little bit of truth all of a sudden just hit them. And I had one lady just kind of quiver and say, “Thank you!” She’d never been told she was a daughter of Eve! Maybe she grew up in a church. I don’t know. But just a minute, a split second, and all of a sudden you could just see it was shaking their world. We ended up having conversations after that again!

It’s not difficult, folks. They’re just people.

So listen... problems of interfaithism as we start to close it up. For those of us who have been to churches and intersected with churches that have flirted with this, and yes, I’ve seen this within the Mennonite community. I come from a Mennonite background, and it’s there. It’s there. 

So here are a few of the problems of interfaithism from the Christian perspective. First of all, it undermines the truth claim of Jesus Christ. He is simply another religious teacher, a spiritual reformer, that’s it. If all religions are equally valid in truth, expressions of truth, then none of them are, and the atheist can rightly say that the Christian is nothing more than a meaningless sect in an ocean of meaningless religions. It undercuts the biblical Great Commission. We work for social justice, we downplay core biblical truths, character of God, nature of man, Jesus Christ alone, because that produces tension. This is about unity, not tension. It entrenches the status quo. We don’t challenge their worldview, they don’t challenge ours. We just have a mushy kind of kumbaya. And it sows discord and confusion in the church, understandably so, because now we have a conflict between what Scripture says and your interfaith promoting leadership. 

So where do we stand? Where does the church stand? Are we gonna be firm in the exclusive truth claim of Jesus Christ, or are we gonna embrace interfaithism? Is He the only way? Wow, that is the question of the age, isn’t it? It’s been the question that we’ve had to wrestle with for 2000 years. Jesus said to His disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And then He said, “Who do you say that I am?” The question that has haunted us for 2,000 years is being lived out in real time right now.

So if you want to tackle interfaithism–I have an entire chapter devoted to that subject in my book Game of Gods. And so avail yourself to that resource. It’s there to be used. Take it and use it as you see fit. And I also have a webpage called Forcing Change. I used to run a magazine, an online digest for nine years, and I have opened the whole thing up. It’s free, it’s just an online archive of my articles and reports. So again, use that information as you see fit. God bless you, and thank you for allowing me to be part of your afternoon. 

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