"Cafeteria Christianity"? Why not?

“Religion is not like a smorgasbord. You can’t just pick a little of this and a little of that.”

Who says? Seminary professors taught us to be be careful about what we say because someone might just believe it.

It is one of those trite sayings preachers toss out to make sure you don’t think for yourself. Heads may nod affirmatively, but no one asks, “Why?” It’s a rhetorical or homiletical device designed to stop the folks in the pews from engaging the preacher in a genuine dialogue.

Some pastors call it “cafeteria Christianity.” Others update it to “Google Christianity.” The idea is that the preacher will decide the menu. You need do nothing more than come to the table and eat what he or she has prepared.

When you asked for something different than what mom put on the table, maybe she responded tartly like mine, “What do you think this is, a buffet? Eat what I’ve put on the table of go to bed hungry.”

To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, “When I was a child, my mother treated me as a child. As I grew up, she allowed me to make my own choices.”

And so, when you went off to college, there it was, a smorgasbord. Someone else still chose the menu but there were many more choices. When you became fully adult, you decided what you wanted. If one restaurant didn’t have it, there were others right around the corner. And if none of them satisfied your longings, you just stayed home.

When preachers denigrate those in the pews by telling them they must “eat what I’ve put on the table of go hungry,” a lot of people go hungry. If you’re trying to understand why the fastest growing religious (or non-religious) demographic is “none of the above,” this may be where you should put your focus.

These folks have not turned away from God so much as they have turned away from preachers who pretend that trying to understand God is more like your mother’s dinner table than a smorgasbord.

Is God really so small and predictable, they ask, that God can be captured by one book or one doctrine? Isn’t it more likely that each of us has a piece of the puzzle while none of us can make out the whole picture? 

Menus offered by every religion from Christianity to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and others should at least be studied by all seekers. We are better prepared to serve God in a diverse world with an honest knowledge of what other choices are offered.

Christianity was not a choice when I was a child. My parents chose for me, taking me to Christian churches to learn the Christian stories exclusively. As an adult, I gradually left much of the post-Easter dogma behind, making the choice to remain a Christian because of the closeness I feel to the Jesus of the Gospels, a devout Jew whose teachings arise wholly from the Bible he read, what Christians call the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible.

There is a place for the Muslim view that there is no God but one and that Jesus is one of Allah’s many prophets. We could all benefit from the mindfulness of Buddhism and radical tolerance of Unitarian Universalism. Further, anyone who hasn’t given at least some thought to becoming an atheist, hasn’t seriously thought about what they believe and why.

Preachers who refuse to accept that religion is indeed like a smorgasbord are motivated by the age-old need theologians have to control the thinking of others. They are comforted, in a way that comforts increasingly fewer adults, with an exclusivist’s sense that there is only one path to the truth.

One of my favorite stories in Jewish scripture is that time Jacob wrestled with God. The God of the universe is big enough to welcome that wrestling match, which is why, unlike my mom, God was willing to lay out a smorgasbord for us.