When confronting the religious diversity and the plurality of apparently competing religious truth-claims, three general responses are possible: a committed particularism that holds one religion (invariably, the particularist’s religion) to be the Truth, and all others in error; second, some form of skepticism that holds either that all religious view are likely to be unreliable, or else that the question is rationally undecidable; or third, some form of pluralism that regards various religious traditions to be more or less on a par in terms of both truth and efficacy In his essay, "The Religion of The Matrix and the Problems of Pluralism," Gregory Bassham further classifies pluralism into four varieties: Extreme Pluralism, which (incoherently) holds all religious systems to be true; Fundamental Teachings Pluralism, which holds all the major religions to be congruent in their fundamental teachings, discounting their differences as secondary characteristics (and thereby forcing actual religious belief and practice into a Procrustean bed); "Cafeteria" Pluralism, which eclectically picks and chooses themes and doctrines from the various religious traditions to create an idiosyncratic personal religion; and Transcendental Pluralism (which Bassham especially identifies with John Hick) the view that all the major religious systems, with their apparently conflicting concepts and practices, are phenomenal representations of a single, noumenal, transcendental reality. As Bassham’s agenda seems to be to defend a form of Christian exclusivism, he proceeds to offer critiques of all four varieties of pluralism in order. This author mostly agrees with three of Bassham’s four critiques, but takes exception to the points he makes against Cafeteria Pluralism. In this essay, Bassham’s objections to the "Cafeteria" approach are examined in order, and then supplemented with a couple additional objections. It is argued that while some specific versions of eclecticism may be vulnerable to one or more of these objections, an eclectic approach to religion may theoretically be more defensible than Bassham claims.

An initial remark needs to be made about nomenclature. The label ‘Cafeteria’ itself, it will seem to some, sets up a straw man. To treat religious ideas as one might a buffet-line immediately suggests that one is approaching religious truths with a faulty attitude: treating them as commodities to be selected and consumed at random or, at best, according to some ultimately arbitrary aesthetic taste. It connotes a dilettante; but a pluralist constructing her own religion need not be a dilettante. She may be creative and experimental, but she may also be highly sophisticated, systematic, and critical, selecting ideas and practices with an eye for overall coherence. In Bassham’s defense it may be noted that the sort of Critical Eclectic I am describing is an ideal, and that perhaps Bassham is not really setting up a straw man precisely because the majority of religious eclectics are dilettantes who are acting like they’re in a cafeteria. Ideally, however, philosophical criticism needs to be directed against the best possible version an opponent’s position, not simply against the most popular ones.

The first major difficulty Bassham identifies with the Cafeteria approach to religion is based the requirement of rational coherence:

If we are less than wholly charitable toward Bassham here (and one may feel we are being no less charitable to Bassham than he is being to the serious religious eclectic), this first difficulty sounds a little bit like a plaintive whine: "It’s ha-a-ard!" "Well," one wants to say, "lots of things are hard. Philosophy is hard, life is hard--in fact, achieving a coherent mix of beliefs about anything is hard, but that is hardly a serious objection to making the attempt!" And, in the case of religious beliefs, how hard can it really be? After all, Bassham himself earlier cites an estimate that humanity has created something on the order of 100,000 religions since the last Ice Age; that’s an average of ten religions a year for the last ten thousand years. And where do the majority of memes that comprise the majority of these new religions come from? In large part, they almost certainly come from other, older religions, the innovations comprising only a fraction of any particular new system. Bassham may respond by asking what proportion of those new religions have actually been coherent; and here he has a point. It is quite plausible to suppose that a large number of dead religions have gone extinct at least partly for reasons of internal incoherence. But then we should not suppose that all the surviving ones, even the major, well-established ones, are totally in order as they stand. To the contrary, one of the chief motivating forces behind the religious seeking that Bassham denigrates with the label "cafeteria" pluralism is the very common experience of cognitive dissonance felt by individuals who very often started out in the mainline traditions, but found them ill-fitting. The orthodox of the major world religions hold no monopoly on logical coherence. So finally, the thoughtful eclectic can respond that as they pick and choose their beliefs, their choices need not be random nor guided solely by considerations of aesthetics or fashion, no more than they need be guided by tradition or traditional, but not logically necessary, associations of ideas. The eclectic is being an eclectic, she may contend, because she is trying to come up with something she regards as more coherent than the religion of her parents. What again makes Bassham’s point seem plausible is the image of the cafeteria: of the pluralist "picking and choosing" her beliefs in a fairly random way, governed at best, perhaps, by certain aesthetic sensibility. But we have already indicated this image may be misleading. The serious, critical eclectic may employ other, more critically reflective criteria. She may be employing considerable logical care in selecting the elements of a tradition she keeps or rejects.

Bassham’s example of reincarnation, with his sweeping generalizations about Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian beliefs, raises additional doubts. It is far from clear that all those who regard the Vedas as sacred texts would deny the possibility of a last judgment, still less clear that all Buddhists interpret the Buddha’s "No-Self" pronouncements in the way Bassham implies, and even less clear (manifestly false) that Christianity has uniformly understood human persons as "psychophysical unities," if that term implies the denial of substance dualism. Bassham’s example thus betrays a perception of religions as monolithic, ahistorical intellectual systems, ignoring the high degree of internal plurality and historical plasticity that real religions often exhibit. Basshams’s argument is an example of false essentialism, reasoning as if religions were natural kinds or organic unities, rather than historically evolving artifacts.

Bassham’s second point, at least at first glance, has more bite to it. "[E]ven if the cafeteria pluralist does manage to achieve a coherent mix of beliefs," Bassham writes, "why should he or she (or anyone else) think that those beliefs are true?" This seems like a fair enough question. "After all," one might add for emphasis, "the pluralist made it up (and she knows it)." If creating a religion is like writing a novel, then believing in the system one has come up with might seem like an author’s delusionally believing in the actual reality of his fictional characters. The further elaboration Bassham offers, however, is not nearly as simple as he seems to suppose. It comes in the form of an odd, subjunctive generalization, "Most contemporary philosophers and theologians would agree that few, if any, specific religious doctrines can be rationally justified without appeal, ultimately, to divine revelation." Why Bassham thinks that most contemporary philosophers would agree with this I can’t imagine. At least one major world religion, Buddhism, was founded and propagated without any appeal to divine revelation. If we replace "divine revelation" with "religious experience," we get something much closer to the truth about what most philosophers probably think, but then it is not unlikely that the pluralist may appeal to religious experience, she may in fact seek out religious experiences of her very own, drawing on methods culled from a variety of spiritual traditions. It could be argued that the unaffiliated cafeteria pluralist is indeed more likely to found her beliefs directly on religious experience than is the average adherent of a large, well-established religion. The latter may be less engaged, more passively accepting of the testimony of others than the experimental individualist will be. Bassham is right in thinking that not just any starting point will do—a self-conscious fabrication is not a revelation, but he seems to (incorrectly) focus on theistic, "revealed" religions as if they provided the only paradigm for understanding religious experience and spiritual insight. Nor does the fact that the eclectic filters both her own experiences as well as the testimony of the traditions through a creative, second-order reconstruction necessarily show that she is engaging in make-believe. The major religious traditions engage in second-order reconstructions of their own. The difference is simply that critical eclectic refuses to credit the representative authorities who insist that one must either accept the whole institutional package or deny every part of it.

Bassham privileges not only theistic paradigms of experience, but specifically Western ones. "There are problems," he continues, "even for theistic cafeteria pluralism. It seems highly unlikely that God would scatter his revelations among the various great world religions—revealing this key truth to the ancient Israelites, that key truth to the Hindus, and so forth." This comment reveals a great deal more about Bassham than it does about God. What seems highly unlikely to Bassham is, I think, a subjective judgment with little grounding in objective a priori probability. Another thinking person, for example, John Hick, might think it "highly unlikely" that God would have favorites (like the Israelites) to whom God would exclusively reveal the whole of His truth. The reason to think that a perfect being worthy of worship would do as Bassham supposes has nothing to do with what is intuitively evident and everything to do with what is already declared within the Judeo-Christian tradition. As a point against pluralism, whether of the "Cafeteria" or "Transcendental" variety, this particular judgment of Bassham’s is highly question-begging.

But more can be said on behalf of the traditionalists. While her quest is in many ways solitary, the traditional mystic’s practice takes place within a larger community that supports, monitors, and guides her progress. Orthodox communities of many religions operate with well-established practices of belief-formation, or "doxastic" practices. The mystics’ individual experiences and their interpretations of them are referenced back to, and critically assessed in terms of, these practices and the larger communities to which they belong. A similar analogical contrast is provided by scientific practice, perhaps the most widely accepted paradigm of good epistemic practice, where scientists also routinely subject their observations to peer review. In contrast, by "going it alone," the critical eclectic seems to miss (and miss out on) not only important communitarian aspects of religious life, but possibly also an essentially social aspect of sound epistemology. Allowing that an idiosyncratic belief-system might be subjectively supported by personal experience, the eclectic’s relative lack of inter-subjective tests and corroboration seems impoverishing if not defeating. As one representative of a meditative community puts it, "[Y]ou have no way of judging spiritual progress if you’re completely alone. There’s no substantial group of other people to keep tabs on you." Indeed, apologists for religious experience such as William Alston seem to think that the tests of time and width of acceptance place an at least prima facie burden of proof upon any new practice; moreover, that this is so constitutes an important defense for reliance on religious experience in general, which would otherwise face a charge of over-permissiveness. Lack of presumption in favor of "more firmly established practices" would, Alston argues, "saddle us with all sorts of bizarre beliefs."

New religions needlessly "reinvent the wheel," and lack the legitimacy conferred by longevity and popularity. A Sufi mystic has put it thus: "We stand in awe before these divine edifices [i.e., the great world religions], amazed by the majesty of knowledge and tenderness of love they embody and by their power to guild billions of souls…What more could we realize by taking apart these awesome revelations and mixing them together to make a new form? It is like taking apart the human body to make a better body, when it’s already the perfect vehicle with which to reach the goal of conscious immersion in God." And venerability conferred by sheer antiquity has also been held to confer authority on the traditional paths. Sister Frederica Mathewes-Green, "We are so indoctrinated by our culture that we can’t trust our standards of evaluation. We can only gain wisdom that transcends time by exiting our time and entering upon an ancient path—and accepting it on its own terms. We can only learn by submitting to something bigger that what we are."

In reply to these points, it should be said, first, that traditional religions also often saddle their adherents with beliefs which, over time, come to seem bizarre to (some of) those same adherents, which is precisely the source of the skeptical impetus which puts the eclectic on her questing path. If a seeker can find a new home in another tradition, the principles of which seem more obviously true, she is to be congratulated; but if not, coming up with a more logical and empowering system of her own seems a preferable option to either a despairing agnosticism or a blind leap. Second, if the standards of our own time are not to be trusted, we shall hardly be a good position to evaluate the standards of another time. And yet, the lack of social monitoring and corroboration must remain a somewhat troubling objection for the eclectic. The reasons she has for what she believes, if they are to be adequate even for her, should at least be such that they might, if communicated clearly, not only make her beliefs understood to others, but persuade at least some others to accept them as well.

Apart from epistemology, it might also be alleged that spirituality itself is essentially social. While there is a popular tendency to distinguish between institutional religion and spirituality, the fact is that a significant part of spirituality involves the sense of being part of something larger than one’s self, and institutional religion’s public rituals and liturgies serve this purpose. The traditional mystic achieves a sense of unity with the larger universe through intense meditative discipline. The average religious practitioner achieves a milder approximation of these experiences in the ritual activities of public worship with others. According to Newberg and D’Aquili, all this may be commonly rooted in human neurobiology. They both speculate and provide some evidence for the hypothesis that the religious longing to be a part of something larger than ourselves is rooted in the suppression of the orientation-association area in the brain’s parietal lobe. In a rather Durkheimian mode, they further propose that such a brain-state served an evolutionary function by promoting our individual ancestors’ identification with larger groups. But the experimental eclectic is something as a loner, and runs the risk of cutting herself off from the social dimension of religious life, which may, it turns out, defeat the whole purpose of religious life. As one minister has put it, "The problem with inventing one’s own practice, . . . is that ritual is meant to connect us to other people who are doing the same thing." Moreover, even if a small cadre of experimentalists band together around the same set of self-consciously collected beliefs and practices, the contingency (and thus fragility) of their support system is far greater than that of the adherent to a major religious tradition.

If this last sociological objection can be met (and I think it is a serious objection), how might a religious eclectic go about the task of rationally constructing their own religion? If one is being methodical, one might begin with some a priori axioms. One might, for instance, attempt to modify a list of axioms originally proposed by Keith Yandell for rationally assessing diverse religious systems. Yandell himself was approaching the problem of religious diversity from a particularist perspective, hoping to vindicate one of the existing conceptual systems over others, but this difference will require only minor modifications to the axioms he proposed. .