I figured it could not be Evangelicals, at least not the really serious ones. All their “witnessing” to others makes sense only if it matters whether one confesses Jesus as one’s Lord and Savior. Confidently I predicted that mainline Protestants scored highest. All the mainline churches, as well as most Jews and all New Age religions, have long since rejected as hubristic, if not idolatrous, the idea that one religion was simply better — more fully true — than the others. If the “authorities” (sic) in these bodies teach the equivalence of religions, the folks in the pews —respondents in Guth’s survey — surely would not believe their faith is better.

Especially the Unitarians. They don’t think you have to believe anything at all. I once met someone who described himself as a “half-hearted” Unitarian. I still have not the slightest notion of what that could mean.

Of course, the Catholic Church stands four square against this indifferentism. While Catholics should acknowledge and value all that is true in other faiths (and much is), the fullness of truth is contained in the Catholic Church. Communion with it, in some way, is essential to salvation.

Well, maybe you have guessed what is coming. Catholics are the most likely religious group to agree with the proposition that one religion is as good as another!

Re-reading Chesterton’s incomparable Orthodoxy on the plane home from Georgia delivered me from despair. For in that book, in a chapter on “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” Chesterton takes aim at this “phrase of facile liberality”: “‘the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.’” And deadly aim it is. Chesterton argued that the opposite is true. For Chesterton, all the religions subsisted on roughly the same ration of smells and bells. “Almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts.” Indeed, they agree in “the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught.” All the faiths have divine messengers, I might add, but that does not make Jesus into Muhammed or Joseph Smith.

Chesterton was most exercised by the “alleged spiritual identity” of Christianity and Buddhism. He reports one asserted resemblance, and refutes it: it is “said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of a coal-cellar.” Or, that both had to do with the washing of feet. Chesterton: “you might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.” No two institutions, Chesterton wrote, “contradict each other so flatly” as Christianity and Buddhism.

Chesterton is probably the greatest Christian apologist of all time. But he was not into apologies. Why be reticent about the truth? His method was to distinguish and contrast; his forensic tools were imagination and dry humor. Chesterton was convinced that Chris tianity was not only true, but that it was obviously true. The faith was, in other words, clearly congruent with common sense. The stumbling block to faith was the sense of the age, what passed for wisdom in the disenchanted culture of the day, all the “facile liberalities.” Imagination freed one from those fetters.

Chesterton was surely free. Here was an immensely learned man whose mind roamed across the ages. And yet he was constantly astonished, amused at what he found. We can easily imagine him looking at life as a yokel might look at the skyscrapers of New York, but with a difference: Chesterton was wide-eyed often enough, but his capacious mind and certain belief in Providence added a certain edge, a serene recognition or, perhaps, the satisfaction of a suspicion confirmed. Staring at the cosmic equivalent of the Empire State Building —say, the Incarnation— I picture him quickly recovering from his surprise. “Yes, yes,” he might say, “how ingenious, how beautiful, how good and sensible that the Lord should enter the world humbly, almost unnoticed.” Scandal to some was common sense to Chesterton.

Looking at life from all sides made it possible for Chesterton to be so funny. He did not dish out howlers, and said nothing side-splitting. But the reader of Orthodoxy, at least, wears a grin from start to finish. Incongruities lurk in almost every paragraph. This too was part of his faith. Or, so it would seem to follow from these closing sentences of Orthodoxy. Jesus “restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness . . . There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”