Why So Many Religions? The Ancient Story Behind Our Modern Confusion

Walk into any major university and you'll find something curious. In the philosophy department, professors debate whether objective truth exists at all. In the anthropology wing, scholars catalogue the world's religions with careful neutrality, treating each as equally valid cultural constructs. Yet in the dining hall, these same academics will passionately argue about justice, human rights, and moral obligation as though such things were self-evidently real and binding on all people everywhere.

Here is the oddity. The very concept of universal moral truth presupposes something like a universal moral order. Yet when we survey the bewildering array of religious traditions across human history, each claiming its own path to truth, the idea of any single story binding all humanity seems not just implausible but almost offensive to modern sensibilities. How can there be one true story when there are so many stories?

Of course one can understand the skepticism. The sheer diversity of religious belief appears, at first glance, to vindicate the relativist position. Perhaps all religions are simply cultural responses to universal human anxieties about death and meaning, each valid within its own context, none uniquely true.

But here's what strikes me as remarkable. The ancient biblical narrative itself predicts precisely this situation. It accounts for religious diversity not as evidence against a single divine story, but as the tragic consequence of humanity's repeated attempts to write alternative stories. The multiplicity of faiths, from this perspective, is not the normal state of things but a symptom of something fundamentally wrong, something that required divine intervention to set right.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not suggesting we can simply dismiss the sincere faith of billions who follow non-Christian paths. Nor am I claiming Christians have always represented the biblical story faithfully. The church's history of violence and cultural imperialism has often contradicted the very narrative we claim to embody. But the question before us is not about sincerity or historical failure. The question is coherence. Can we make sense of religious diversity? And does the biblical narrative offer resources for understanding it that secular frameworks lack?

The Crisis at the Beginning

The biblical story begins with a unified humanity in relationship with a single Creator. This is not mythology in the modern sense of pleasant fiction. The writers of Genesis present this as actual history, as the foundation of everything that follows. One God, one human family, one story.

What happened?

The narrative describes a fracturing, a deliberate turn away from the Creator toward something else. The technical term is idolatry, but that word has lost its bite in our therapeutic age. We tend to think of idolatry as a quaint ancient practice, bowing before statues we moderns are too sophisticated to take seriously. But the biblical writers understood idolatry as something more fundamental and more dangerous. It was the exchange of reality for fiction, the worship of what we could control for the God we could not.

This was not a philosophical mistake. It was, in the strongest possible terms, treason. And like all treason, it had consequences.

I remember a conversation with a colleague who taught comparative religion. He was genuinely puzzled by my claim that the biblical tradition saw other religions not as different paths up the same mountain but as, in Paul's stark phrase, worship of "demons" rather than God. "Surely," he said, "you can't actually believe that sincere Hindus or Buddhists are worshipping demons?"

I understand the question, and it deserves a careful answer. The biblical perspective is not that every practitioner of another religion is consciously serving evil. Rather, the claim is that the systems themselves, however much truth they may contain, are built on a foundation of misdirection. They offer partial light while obscuring the source of that light. They promise fulfillment while directing worship away from the only one who can actually fulfill.

The ancient world understood something we've largely forgotten. Religion was never just about personal spirituality or individual meaning-making. It was about cosmic allegiance. To worship a particular god was to declare which power you believed governed the universe, which story you believed was true. When Israel's prophets thundered against idolatry, they were not primarily concerned with religious pluralism as a philosophical problem. They were addressing a crisis of loyalty and a confusion about what was actually real.

The Babel Moment and Its Aftermath

The story reaches a critical turning point at Babel. Here we find humanity united in a collective project that directly challenges divine authority. The response is dramatic. God confuses their language and scatters them across the earth. What follows this moment shapes the entire subsequent narrative.

Michael Heiser's careful work with Second Temple Jewish texts illuminates something often missed in Sunday school versions of this story. The scattering of humanity was not merely geographical and linguistic. According to Deuteronomy 32:8-9, read in light of its proper textual tradition, God divided the nations and placed them under the authority of "the sons of God," divine intermediaries who were meant to rule on his behalf. But these intermediaries became corrupt. They began accepting worship for themselves rather than directing it upward toward the Creator.

This is not peripheral biblical mythology. This is how the ancient Israelites understood their world. They were surrounded by nations, each with its own gods, its own cult, its own sacred story. The gods of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan were not dismissed as mere fiction by the biblical writers. They were understood as real spiritual powers, but powers that had betrayed their commission, leading humanity away from truth rather than toward it.

The result was a proliferation of religious systems, each centered on these territorial spiritual authorities. The diversity of religions thus becomes not evidence for relativism but evidence of what happens when the singular divine story splinters under the weight of rebellion.

Granted, one can reject this narrative as ancient mythology. Many do, and for reasons they find compelling. But notice what you lose if you discard it. The secular account of religious diversity typically relies on evolutionary or sociological explanations (religion as adaptive behavior, as cultural glue, as response to existential anxiety). These explanations may account for why humans are religious, but they cannot account for why we continue to insist that some things are objectively right and wrong, some causes objectively worth dying for, some truths worth more than survival itself.

The biblical narrative offers something different. It suggests that our moral vocabulary, our sense that truth matters and justice is real, our inability to live as consistent relativists, all point back to the original story, the one we've tried to leave behind but cannot quite escape.

The Pattern Across History

Israel's Distinctive Witness

When you examine the Ancient Near Eastern context in which Israel emerged, the pattern becomes clearer. The archaeological and textual evidence shows remarkable overlap between Israelite literature and that of surrounding cultures. Legal codes echo Mesopotamian precedents. Wisdom literature shares forms with Egyptian instruction texts. Even creation accounts show structural similarities to Babylonian cosmogonies.

So far, we understand the scholarly consensus. The biblical writers were not operating in isolation. They inherited literary forms and cultural categories from the broader ancient world.

But here is what sets Israel apart. While the content and forms overlapped considerably with neighboring cultures, the religious practice was radically different. Israel insisted on one God. Not as the highest among many, not as the particular patron deity of one nation among many national gods, but as the only God, the Creator of all, the one to whom ultimate allegiance was owed regardless of geography or ethnicity.

This was not a natural development from polytheism. It was, in the ancient context, almost incomprehensible. Every nation had its gods. Every territory its divine patron. The idea that one invisible God claimed authority over all nations, all peoples, all territories was revolutionary.

The Temptation to Conform

Yet Israel repeatedly struggled to maintain this distinctive witness. The prophets' constant refrain was that the people kept trying "to be like the nations," adopting the religious practices of their neighbors, hedging their bets with multiple divine allegiances. The attraction was understandable. Polytheism was flexible. It allowed for syncretism, for adding new gods to your pantheon without rejecting old ones. The strict monotheism demanded by Torah was uncompromising and, frankly, risky. What if you bet everything on the wrong god?

That's the question, isn't it? In a world of many religions, many truth claims, many paths, how do you decide? The modern answer is often to avoid deciding, to treat all paths as equally valid or equally suspect. But this solution creates its own problems. Try living as though your deepest moral convictions were merely cultural preferences, no more binding than a taste for certain foods or music. Try facing genuine evil (trafficking, genocide, abuse) and maintaining that all moral frameworks are equally valid cultural constructs.

You cannot do it. Not if you want to remain coherent. Not if you want to look victims in the eye and say their suffering matters, objectively matters, in a universe that cares about justice.

The Challenge of Universal Origins

The Geographic Problem

The diversity of religions becomes more complicated when we zoom out to consider the full sweep of human history. As European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encountered peoples in the Americas, in the Pacific, in regions previously unknown to the biblical world, difficult questions emerged. If all humanity descended from Noah and his sons, as Genesis claimed, how did these peoples end up where they were? How long had they been separated? Were they really all part of the same story?

The Pre-Adamite Hypothesis

Isaac La Peyrère's 17th-century hypothesis of "Pre-Adamites" (humans existing before Adam) arose directly from these tensions. If you took seriously the ethnographic evidence of diverse peoples with their own ancient religious traditions, and if you also took seriously biblical chronology, you had a problem. Either the biblical account was wrong about human origins, or these peoples had somehow been omitted from the narrative.

The theory was eventually deemed heretical, and for good reason. It wasn't merely that La Peyrère challenged traditional chronology. It was that his hypothesis unraveled the entire biblical storyline. If humans existed before Adam, then death existed before Adam's sin. And if death predated the Fall, then Paul's entire argument in Romans collapses. The whole structure of sin entering through one man, of death as the consequence of that sin, of Christ as the second Adam who defeats death, none of it works if death was already part of the created order before human rebellion.

This is not a minor theological technicality. It's the foundation of the gospel itself. The biblical narrative insists that death is an intruder, not a feature. It's the enemy that must be defeated, not the natural end of biological processes. Remove this, and you're left with a very different story, one where salvation means escape from the physical rather than redemption of it, where the resurrection becomes optional or merely symbolic rather than the vindication of God's purposes for his whole creation.

The Universality at Stake

The Pre-Adamite theory, though it represented an honest attempt to reconcile observation with Scripture, ultimately revealed something more fundamental: the biblical narrative makes claims about all humanity, not just one cultural stream. It insists that every religious tradition, however ancient or distant from Jerusalem, must be understood in relation to a single origin story, a single crisis, and a single solution.

This universality is not incidental to the biblical narrative. It's the whole point. The story begins with one creation, one human family, one purpose. The multiplication of nations at Babel is presented as fracture, not as the natural order. The call of Abraham is explicitly about restoring blessing to all nations. The prophetic vision looks forward to a time when all peoples will stream to Jerusalem to learn Torah, when the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Either this grand narrative is true (in which case religious diversity is a problem to be addressed, not a feature to be celebrated) or it is false, in which case we must find another ground for the moral certainties we cannot help but feel.

The Spiritual Warfare Underneath

The biblical writers do not attribute religious diversity solely to human failure. They insist there is active spiritual opposition at work, cosmic powers that benefit from keeping humanity fractured and confused about who God is.

This is not a comfortable claim for modern people. We have rightly moved past the superstitious attribution of every misfortune to demonic activity. But the biblical perspective is more sophisticated than cartoon devils. It suggests that there are intelligent spiritual forces with a vested interest in maintaining systems of false worship, in keeping humans enslaved to patterns that promise fulfillment while delivering only frustration.

Paul's language about the "god of this age" blinding minds, about principalities and powers, about Satan masquerading as an angel of light, this is not meant as mythology or metaphor. It's a description of how the world actually works, according to the scriptural worldview. The proliferation of religious systems, each offering its own path to enlightenment or salvation or transcendence, represents not just human confusion but coordinated spiritual deception.

To be sure, this is precisely the sort of exclusive claim that makes religious conflict inevitable, many will say. If everyone believes their path is the true one and others are deceived, how can there be peace?

It's a valid concern. But notice what the biblical narrative actually offers. It does not suggest that Christians are somehow immune to deception or that the church has always faithfully represented truth. The prophets spent most of their energy criticizing God's own people for failing to embody the covenant they claimed to represent. The New Testament is frank about the church's failures and divisions. The point is not that Christians always get it right. The point is that there is a true story, a story that makes sense of human experience in ways competing narratives cannot.

And here is what that story offers that secular relativism does not: a basis for judgment without arrogance, for confidence without tribalism, for universal truth claims without cultural imperialism. Because the story is not ultimately about us. It's about what God has done to restore the fractured human family to its original purpose.

Where We Stand Now

The Aftermath of Fracture

So we return to our opening puzzle. Why so many religions? Why such profound disagreement about ultimate reality, about the nature of God, about how humans should live?

The biblical answer is that we're living in the aftermath of a catastrophic fracture. The original unity has been shattered. Spiritual powers that were meant to serve have become tyrants. Humans who were meant to reflect the Creator's character have fashioned gods in their own image, gods who bless their tribe's ambitions and sanctify their prejudices.

But (and this is the crucial turn in the narrative) the story is not over.

The One Who Claims to Be the Way

The God who scattered the nations at Babel is also the God who called Abraham to begin the long work of restoration. The God who allowed Israel to choose exile through idolatry is also the God who promised return. And according to Christian faith, this same God became human in Jesus to accomplish what no mere reformation could achieve.

This is where the scandal of particularity meets the promise of universality. Jesus did not come simply to add another religious option to the marketplace of ideas. His claim was far more audacious and far more specific. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," he said. "No one comes to the Father except through me."

One can see why this statement offends modern sensibilities. It sounds exclusive, narrow, even arrogant. But notice what it actually claims. Jesus is not presenting himself as one path among many equally valid routes. He is claiming to be the restoration of the original way, the embodiment of truth itself, the source of the life that death has interrupted. He is the second Adam, the one through whom the fracture is healed, the powers are defeated, and the way back to the Father is opened.

This is not religious imperialism. It's the climax of the story we've been tracing. If death really did enter through one man's rebellion, if the scattering of humanity at Babel really was a judgment on human pride, if the territorial gods really are rebel powers leading people astray, then salvation cannot come through multiple paths. It must come through the defeat of those powers and the reversal of that death. And the biblical narrative insists that this happened in Jesus: in his life, his death on a Roman cross, and his resurrection on the third day.

The resurrection, in particular, is not a pleasant add-on to Jesus' moral teaching. It's the vindication of his claims. It's God's declaration that death has been defeated, that the powers have been disarmed, that the way back is open. Paul's entire argument about Christ as the second Adam depends on this. If death came through Adam, life comes through Christ. If the fracture began with one man's disobedience, restoration begins with one man's obedience unto death.

This is why the question of religious diversity ultimately points to Christ. Not because Christians are better than others or because the church has a spotless track record. The church's long history of failure to embody the gospel it proclaims should keep us humble. But the question remains: if the biblical story about humanity's origin, fracture, and need for restoration is true, then through whom does that restoration come?

The Christian answer is not that all religions are equally wrong. It's that all religions bear witness, in fragmentary and distorted ways, to truths they cannot fully grasp because they remain cut off from the source. The hunger for transcendence in Buddhism, the emphasis on submission in Islam, the celebration of divine presence in Hinduism, these point to realities the biblical story affirms. But they point to them from within the fracture, from a position still under the influence of the powers that divide.

Jesus claimed to be the restoration of the original unity. The one through whom all nations would be blessed, as promised to Abraham. The one who would gather the scattered children of God, as the prophets foretold. The one who would establish God's kingdom not through military conquest or cultural imperialism but through the power of self-giving love that defeats death itself.

Kingdom, Not Tribalism

I spent my early years in Catholic tradition, moved through Pentecostal experience, and have landed in a place that refuses to identify the kingdom of God with either Democrat or Republican, left or right. This is not evasion. It's recognition that the biblical story transcends our political categories even as it speaks to them. The proliferation of religious and political tribalisms we see today (each claiming absolute truth while demonizing opponents) mirrors the Babel moment more than it reflects the unity God intends.

The multiplication of faiths, from a biblical perspective, is a problem that requires a solution. And the solution is not coercive conversion or cultural imperialism. It is the patient, costly work of bearing witness to a different story, of embodying a different way of being human, of demonstrating that the kingdom of God offers what all the other kingdoms promise but cannot deliver.

The question is not whether we can prove our story is true in a way that would satisfy neutral observers. There are no neutral observers. We all stand within some story, some framework of meaning. The question is which story best accounts for the full range of human experience: our capacity for nobility and our propensity for evil, our hunger for transcendence and our enslavement to the immediate, our insistence that justice is real and our difficulty defining what justice means.

The biblical narrative says: You are part of a grander story than you realize. Your inability to escape moral categories, your sense that some things are objectively wrong, your conviction that human dignity matters, these point back to the original design, to the image of God that no amount of rebellion has been able to fully erase. The many religions you see around you are not evidence that all paths lead home. They are evidence that we have wandered far from home but cannot stop looking for it.

Jesus claimed to be the way home. Not a way, but the way. Not a truth among many truths, but the truth that makes sense of all partial truths. Not a life to be added to our religious portfolio, but the life that conquers the death that has haunted humanity since the first fracture.

And perhaps, in a world so fractured and uncertain, that claim is precisely what we need to hear again. Not as a weapon to wield against others, but as an invitation to come home.