God Is Bigger Than Your Religion—And Always Has Been

There is something deeply unsettling to me about the insistence on exclusivity in spirituality and religion, and the more I reflect on it, the more it feels like a kind of collective amnesia about the vastness of human experience. When we step back and look across the sweep of history—across continents, cultures, and civilizations—we are confronted with a breathtaking diversity of spiritual expressions, beliefs, and encounters with what people have consistently described as the unseen or transcendent realm. From the mystics of India who spoke of union with Brahman, to the philosophers of Greece who contemplated the Logos, to the prophets of Israel, the early followers of Jesus, the indigenous shamans of the Americas, and countless others, we find not a void of spiritual awareness outside of any one tradition, but a rich tapestry of encounters that often carry striking similarities in depth, intensity, and transformative power. And yet, despite this overwhelming evidence, there remains within many religious frameworks a tendency to claim that one particular path, one interpretation, one set of doctrines stands alone as the exclusive bearer of truth. To me, that is not just a theological position—it is the height of hubris.

What seems to be overlooked in this exclusivist mindset is the undeniable role that culture plays in shaping how spiritual experiences are interpreted, articulated, and transmitted. Human beings do not encounter the divine in a vacuum. We encounter it as embodied, situated beings, shaped by language, symbols, traditions, and expectations. When someone in one part of the world experiences a profound sense of unity, presence, or revelation, they will naturally describe it using the conceptual framework available to them. Another person, in a different time and place, may have a remarkably similar experience but interpret it through an entirely different lens. The experience itself may share a common essence, but the explanation of it diverges because culture provides the vocabulary and structure. To deny this is to ignore the basic reality of how human cognition and meaning-making function. It is to pretend that one group somehow transcended all cultural influence while everyone else remained bound by it, which is not only historically implausible but philosophically inconsistent.

When we begin to acknowledge this, something important happens. The rigid walls that separate “us” from “them,” “true” from “false,” begin to soften. We start to see that what we have often called competing truth claims may actually be different angles on a reality that exceeds any single system’s ability to fully capture it. This does not mean that all ideas are equally accurate in every respect, nor does it require us to abandon discernment. But it does call for humility—a recognition that whatever truth we perceive, we perceive it partially, through a glass darkly, filtered through layers of tradition and interpretation that we did not create but inherited. It invites us to consider that revelation itself may be an ongoing, dynamic process rather than a closed, finalized deposit handed to one group for all time.

Tribalism in religion often emerges from a very human need for identity, belonging, and certainty. There is comfort in believing that we are on the “right side,” that we have the answers, that we are part of the group that has been uniquely chosen or enlightened. But this comfort comes at a cost. It narrows our vision, limits our capacity for empathy, and, perhaps most tragically, blinds us to the possibility that the same Spirit we revere may be at work in ways and places we have been taught to dismiss. When we reduce the infinite to the boundaries of our own tradition, we are not protecting truth—we are constricting it. We are taking something that, by its very nature, transcends all categories and confining it within the walls of our own making.

I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea that what humanity has been experiencing across the ages is not a series of isolated, contradictory revelations, but a multifaceted encounter with a reality that is both immanent and transcendent, both knowable and inexhaustible. Different traditions, then, are not necessarily competing claims to exclusive ownership of truth, but expressions—sometimes clearer, sometimes more obscured—of a shared underlying reality. They are maps, not the territory; lenses, not the light itself. And like all maps and lenses, they are shaped by the conditions under which they were formed.

To claim that one’s own spirituality or religion is the only correct one, in light of all this, seems less like a statement of faith and more like a refusal to engage with the full scope of human spiritual history. It is to ignore the voices of billions, past and present, whose experiences do not fit neatly within a single framework. It is to elevate one perspective to an absolute status it cannot reasonably sustain. True spirituality, as I see it, does not shrink the world into a single narrative but expands our awareness of the many ways the divine has been encountered and understood. It invites us not into arrogance, but into wonder; not into exclusion, but into a deeper appreciation of the unity that underlies our diversity. And perhaps, in that humility, we come closer to the truth than any claim of exclusivity ever could.