“The pluralism which I call a false god is a pluralism which suggests that all religions are equally true or valid. When pluralism moves beyond the protection of everybody’s right both to believe and even to propagate that belief peacefully, and then also argues that none of those beliefs is more true than any other of those beliefs—then something that started off as very good has become a false god.”

When I heard a good friend emphatically tell a large audience last week that the most pressing issue for the Christian community in the years just ahead is not going to be homosexuality or gay marriage or abortion or Obamacare, he got my attention. None of those, he said. The central issue will be pluralism.

His assertion caught my attention because of an exchange I’d had 13 years ago, in the days right after the horrors of 9/11. We naturally devoted a whole issue of WORLD to the al-Qaeda attack on the United States, and I entitled my column in that issue “Sinflation”—arguing that our regular disregard of God’s standards always leads a society to collapse. We had allowed ourselves to pursue false gods, I argued, and now those false gods were forsaking us. “High on our own Western shelf of false deities,” I argued, “have been the gods of nominalism, materialism, secularism, and pluralism.” And we shouldn’t be surprised if others in the world saw the World Trade Center as symbols of such gods, towering as they did over the world’s financial capital, and capped as they were by the transmitting towers of major media and entertainment centers.

In retrospect, I should have been more careful on a couple of fronts. Later that same week, Jerry Falwell charged that the 9/11 attacks were in fact God’s judgment on the United States. I had not said anything that specific, and winced at Falwell’s implication that we could know the mind of God. I was saying only that we shouldn’t be surprised that others were offended by our lifestyle.

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