Christian examines his faith, and the truth of other religions

IT’S easy to understand why Bill Moyers chose to follow “The Power of Myth,” his phenomenally successful series of PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell, with a series on Huston Smith. The son of Methodist missionaries, Smith spent his childhood in rural China, watching with the eyes of an innocent the interplay between his parents’ Christian faith and the ancient folk religion of the Chinese villagers among whom they lived. Somehow, in the almost eight decades since then, Smith has managed to keep that sense of innocence and openness intact, even as he developed into one of the world’s most learned authorities on comparative religion.

Like countless undergrads who have encountered Smith’s seminal book “The World’s Religions” in survey classes over the years, Smith puzzled, as a young man, over the great question of the comparative religionist: How can different faiths all be true? The concept that the world’s faiths speak in different tongues of a transcendent reality common to them all is no longer a radical one, thanks in large part to Smith and a handful of other mid-20th century popularizers such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and, of course, Campbell.

It’s a point Smith came to argue repeatedly over the years, most convincingly in 1976’s brilliant and underappreciated “Forgotten Truth.” Along with it went another, equally important point: In handing the reins over to science, the modern world has made an assumption as dangerous and damaging as it is incorrect: That in matters of truth, absence of evidence equals evidence of absence. In other words, if the tools of scientific investigation are unable to shine a light on spiritual matters, then that must mean they cannot be true in any significant sense.

“After biological needs are met, religion is the greatest resource people have,” writes Smith in his latest book, “The Soul of Christianity.” “The fact that science cannot get its hands on anything except nature is no proof that nature (alternatively, matter) is all that exists.”

As viewers of Moyers’ series discovered, Smith is as appealing and generous-spirited as his books. Elfin and convivial, he is a walking, talking advertisement for his central belief that at a deep level, as opposed to the shallower ones where they so frequently clash, different faiths can not only coexist but also feed and enlarge each other. Though nominally still a Methodist, Smith has long made a practice of pointedly incorporating elements from all over the religious map into his philosophy, and his life.

Smith has often characterized himself as a basketball player with one foot firmly planted in Christianity and the other foot bouncing everywhere from Buddhism to Native American spirituality. “The Soul of Christianity” finds him squarely in the Christian zone of the court, however, and in it he makes a stronger-than-usual case for its uniqueness among all the world’s faiths.

Focusing on the early centuries of the church, before the electrifying newness of the Christian message had been muted and obscured by the blanket of history, Smith writes vividly about what made this religion stand out, even in a Mediterranean world where new religions came and went like TV sitcoms.

“The Incarnation claimed that there was something new in the Christian message; namely, its proclamation of the kind of God that God was, as demonstrated by God’s willingness to assume a human form and live a human life. That willingness, together with the character of Jesus’ life, added up to a different -- indeed radical -- understanding of divinity that shocked the Mediterranean world and set it on its heels. In this upstart view, God was concerned about humanity; concerned enough to suffer on its behalf. This was unheard of, to the point that the reaction to it was disbelief followed by alarm.”

One of Smith’s great strengths as a popularizer is his fearlessness in presenting spiritual concerns as more than simply subjective. He has never been one to denature the landscapes of faith by reducing the details of their geography to mere psychological constructs. The spiritual domain is, for Smith, one that can be investigated every bit as objectively as the domains of science can, albeit with different tools. If one is looking for a short, friendly introduction to what makes Christianity what it is, and why the vision of the divine yet human God it ushered in might still matter in a world often too one-dimensionally divided between red states and blue, “The Soul of Christianity” is it.

Ptolemy Tompkins is the author of “Paradise Fever” and “The Beaten Path.”