Multi-Religious Retreats Offer Variety in Faith
Religious retreats are traditionally focused on strengthening a particular faith, but a new type is cropping up where believers of a variety of faiths are worshipping together.
Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Zoroastrian, Judaic, Christian and Islamic texts are read aloud during the same Sunday service at a Muslim Sufi religious retreat in New York, according to The Associated Press. The Sufi Muslim retreat leader speaks about Jesus and the peace that he has inside.
This is the scene at Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York, about 25 miles southeast of Albany. At this retreat center, guests are invited to deepen their faith without converting. There is a woman who even described herself as a Sufi Christian.
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Nearby, the Buddhists at Zen Mountain Monastery say they see no conflict with Buddhist practice and a person's search for God.
During instruction, guests are taught how to sit, breathe, and meditate. Buddhist leaders at the temple consider the mind a sense organ and believe people spend their lives daydreaming or worrying about the same thing instead of living in the moment.
Likewise Elat Chayyim Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut, welcomes "seekers who have walked other spiritual paths" and those with no Jewish eduction.
Perhaps the multi-faith retreats are part of the increasing openness Americans have towards their personal faith.
A landmark survey released in June found that although America remains a deeply religious nation, most Americans don't believe their religion is the only way to eternal life.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of 35,000 adults found that 57 percent of evangelical church attendants said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, which contradicts with traditional evangelical teaching.
Overall, 70 percent of Americans with a religious affiliation had the same openness towards the path to eternal life. Sixty-eight percent said there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion.
"The survey shows religion in America is, indeed, 3,000 miles wide and only three inches deep," said D. Michael Lindsay, a Rice University sociologist of religion, to AP.
"There's a growing pluralistic impulse toward tolerance and that is having theological consequences," he said.
Eighty-three percent of mainline Protestants, 59 percent of those at historic black Protestant churches, 79 percent of Roman Catholics, 82 percent of Jews, and 56 percent of Muslims said many religions can lead to eternal life.
"What most people are saying is, 'Hey, we don't have a hammer-lock on God or salvation, and God's bigger than us and we should respect that and respect other people,'" said the Rev. Tom Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
"Some people are like butterflies that go from flower to flower, going from religion to religion — and frankly they don't get that deep into any of them," he said.
Some Christian leaders do not welcome this new inclusive outlook on religion.
"If by tolerance we mean we're willing to engage or embrace a multitude of ways to salvation, that's no longer evangelical belief," said Roger Oldham, vice president with the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. "The word 'evangelical' has been stretched so broadly, it's almost an elastic term."
