Whenever I'm sitting next to someone on a plane, the conversation almost always turns from the weather to religion to Christ. A few years ago my wife and I were sitting together when I noticed that the woman across the aisle was wearing a cross necklace. Hoping to stimulate a discussion, I said, "Thanks for wearing that cross. We do have a wonderful Savior, don't we?"

She rolled her eyes and responded, "Well, I don't think of the cross like you do. just look at this." She showed me that beneath the cross was the Jewish Star of David, and beneath that was a trinket that symbolized the Hindu god Om. "I'm in social work," she told me. "I've discovered that people find God in different ways. Christianity is but one path to the divine." She went on to say that she preferred spirituality to religion, the search for experience to specific beliefs. She believed in a pantheistic god, a force that need not be feared.

Conversations such as these reinforce my belief that spirituality is flourishing and with it a growing confidence that there are many ways to reach God. Creeds are out; feelings are in. Writing in Time, screenwriter and Hollywood producer Marty Kaplan says, "What attracted me to meditation was its apparent religious neutrality. You don't have to believe anything; all you have to do is do it. I was worried that reaping its benefits would require some faith that I could only fake, but I was happy to learn that 90% of meditation was about showing up."1 To be truly spiritual, we are told, a creed is not only unnecessary but unwanted. "Americans", someone has said, "are busy inventing unorthodox ways of getting where they're going."

Christianity is being so redefined that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish it from Buddhism or other Eastern religious ideas. We can now be spiritual without God, without "beliefs." And with this drift to pantheism, we also have growing intolerance toward historic Christianity. At a state university a sign read, "It is OK for you to think you are right. It is not OK for you to think someone else is wrong." In the last decade sin has been defined out of existence, but if one sin still exists, it is thinking someone else is wrong. Truth, we are told, is not something to be discovered; it is something to be made up, something to be manufactured either individually or by consensus. One's feelings are more important than, say, the words of Jesus.

Our pluralistic culture rejects outright the claim that God can be approached in only one way. All that the Southern Baptists have to do is ask their members to pray that their Jewish friends would recognize Christ as their Messiah, and a storm of protest erupts. The unity of all the world religions seems like such a worthy goal that those who oppose it are perceived as arrogant, bigoted and yes, intolerant.

When I was in college, belief in God among the intellectual elite was thought to be antiquated; students and faculty alike patronizingly referred to it as a relic of simpler, less sophisticated times. But the secularism that reigned at the time left a vacuum in the human soul, and thus our cultural pendulum has swung back toward spirituality, though now it's a New Age one.