Religious pluralism challenges people in different ways at different times.

In ancient Israel, monotheism emerged slowly. What did it mean to worship one God? “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone” ­(Deuteronomy 6:4).

Was Yahweh merely greater than the gods of ­Canaan, who also had power? Or was Yahweh the only real God and the others imaginary?

In 16th-century Europe, non-Christian infidels and Christian heretics alike were thought to deserve death. Christendom feared “the Turks” (Muslims). Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler enraged the inquisitors at his trial by saying that, if war were right, he would rather fight on the side of the Turks, who did not know the gospel, than alongside Christians who knew it but did not obey.

A century later, the Enlightenment ushered in a modern era when logic and reason held sway. Arguments and evidence (or the threat of hell) were the methods to persuade the heathen to convert or the sinner to repent.

Since the second half of the 20th century, a postmodern culture recognizes multiple sources of spiritual insight and the validity of mystery and ambiguity in religious experience.

Anabaptists today seek peaceable relationships among people of different faiths. Theologies vary, but, for many, attempts to “save the lost” have largely given way to sharing “the hope that is in [us]” (1 Peter 3:15) without overtly proselytizing.

Writers in our August issue extend the definition of interfaith relationships beyond the major religions.

Peter Sensenig suggests a novel idea: An interfaith gap exists between generations. During a meeting with Muslims in Iran, he proposed that “the most important interfaith dialogue is with our children, whose experiences of the world are different from our own.”

The gap between baby boomers and millennials/Gen Z is impacting the church today. It’s not just that the certainties of modernism (which imposed conformity of belief and behavior) are alien to those born since the 1980s. It’s also that the rapid growth of secularism has diminished North America’s nominally Christian culture. The percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation nearly doubled from 2007 (16%) to 2022 (31%).

Christianity used to be the default. Now it’s normal to be a “none.” It might be no exaggeration to call a conversation about religion between someone born in 1960s and someone born in the 2000s an interfaith encounter.

For people of any age, interactions between churchgoers and the religiously unaffiliated are interfaith relationships, too — because to be a none is to make a choice about religion. It might mean being atheist/agnostic. Or being spiritual but not religious — in which case, an ­“anti-dogma spiritual collective” (a “church for nones”) might be a good fit. Or being disillusioned with church as one has known it but open to new expressions of faith and community.

Desmond Tutu, the late South African archbishop, argues against religious exclusiveness in his 2011 book, God Is Not a Christian. “Accidents of birth and geography determine to a very large extent to what faith we belong,” he points out. Chances are good that if you were born in Pakistan you are a Muslim, a Hindu if born in India, a Shintoist if in Japan and a Christian if in Italy.

This realization, Tutu says, should make us open to learning from other faiths — “walk[ing] reverently on what is their holy ground” while “not claiming that we alone possess all truth.”

Such humility does not conflict with firm convictions: “We must hold to our particular and peculiar beliefs tenaciously,” Tutu says, as we seek the “supernatural and divine reality . . . [that] transcends all our particular categories of thought and understanding.”

In Judaism, a rabbinic story says “God took truth and cast it to the Earth.” One imagines truth scattered to pieces as it hits the ground, then gathered up by people to understand in their unique ways.