Last week, I wrote a post about humanism ransacking religious festivals and rituals for their own purposes. Several people have picked up on this and written their own posts on the subject.

James Pate had some thoughts and musings in a post whose title says it all: “But It Is My Tradition, Too”. James writes,

What exactly is wrong with Christians holding a seder, or incorporating elements of Judaism into their faith life? The Exodus is part of the Christian tradition as much as it is part of Judaism. And, sure, there are things that the Exodus means to Christians that it does not mean to Jews, such as the Passover lamb pointing to Christ’s sacrifice. But why can’t a Christian celebrate God’s activity in history on behalf of his people Israel? And why can’t a Christian do so while acknowledging that the Exodus story has specific significance for him, a Christian?

James is correct, of course, that the exodus is a part of Christian tradition. We should celebrate it as an example of God’s liberating work. The seder, however, is not a part of Christian tradition. Early Jewish Christians still celebrated Jewish holidays, but Gentile Christians did not, at least not in their original form. The seder became the Eucharist. The exodus is the central saving event for Jews. But for Christians, that event has been eclipsed by the cross.

The seder is central and unique to Judaism. It is almost a sine qua non. When outsiders, even well-meaning outsiders, take the seder and use it for their own purposes, they are taking something central and using it in a peripheral way. That to me seems insulting. It also amounts to cultural plagiarism, since we are taking something that our culture did not create and saying that it is ours to do with as we please.

In other words, we can celebrate the exodus as Christians, but we need to find a means other than the seder for doing so.

Aside from the seder, James does agree that syncretism is a bad thing, a point that is also picked up by John Hobbins in his post “Why Unitarianism is on a Roll”.  Both James and John (and Peter, I assume) point to an essay by John Levenson entitled “The Problem with Salad Bowl Religion”.  Levenson has some great things to say about syncretism.  The following paragraph cuts to the heart of the matter:

At the deepest level, an act performed in order to subordinate one’s own will to the will of God is vastly different from the identical act performed in pursuit of other goals—self-expression, aesthetic pleasure, familial nostalgia, ethnic identification, whatever. The motivation, of course, is not transparent, and if we go only by appearances, syncretistic worship that includes Jewish elements looks like a hyphenation of traditional Judaism with other things. In fact, it is only the semblances of the Jewish observance that have been imported. Their deeper authorization—the unique claims of the Covenant of Sinai upon the people Israel—have been tacitly but thoroughly denied.

The problem with the buffet style approach to religion is that it gets things backwards.  When we pick and choose from religions, we mold the religion to fit us.  But religion is supposed to be about religion molding us to be the people that God wants us to be.

The comparison with a buffet is apt.  When we eat meals chosen by a trained nutritionist, we have a well-balanced diet that provides us with all the protein, carbs, fiber, and vitamins that our bodies need.  I don’t know about you, but that is not what happens when I go to a buffet.  I end up eating foods I like, and the foods I like are not particularly healthy.  In the same way, few people are able to design their own well-balanced and nutritious spiritual diet.

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