David French writes for the New York Times. Since only subscribers receive this commentary, I copied the whole thing below.

I invite you to see these excerpts and then read the whole commentary.

The fundamentalist mind is largely free of doubt. It presumes to know the mind of God not just on the core elements of the faith — the life, death and resurrection of Jesus — but on virtually all matters that touch on Christian faith. Fundamentalists believe they know exactly how God wants you to vote, to raise your kids, and even which movies and television programs he wants you to watch.

Rather, what Francis is arguing is that God in his mercy does not reserve his grace or his presence to the adherents of a single faith.

Sincerely,

Ed

How can different religions be “like different languages in order to arrive at God”?

	By David French

Pope Francis made two comments last week that touched off a tempest in Christendom.

First, during an interreligious meeting at Catholic Junior College in Singapore, he said that religions are “like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. And if God is God for all, then we are all sons and daughters of God.”

The idea that we are sons and daughters of God is basic Christian doctrine. He is the creator, and we are his creation. But the pope’s statements go farther than simply recognizing God’s sovereignty. He indicated that other faiths can reach God as well. “But,” he continued, “‘my God is more important than your God!’ Is that true? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language, so to speak, in order to arrive at God.”

Then, in a news conference on his flight home, he addressed the American presidential election and criticized both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. “Both are against life,” the pope said, Harris because of her stance on abortion and Trump because of his stance on immigration. Pope Francis would not choose between them. Instead, he said, “Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”

The backlash to both these ideas was immediate. Critics accused the pope of being “counter-scriptural.” The archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput wrote, “To suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God?” Partisans on both sides were incredulous at the pope’s application of Catholic doctrine and infuriated that he deferred to voters’ individual consciences.

I have a different perspective. Pope Francis wasn’t watering down the Christian faith; he was expressing existential humility. He was unwilling to state, definitively, the mind of God and to pass judgment on the souls of others. His words were surprising not because they were heretical in any way, but rather because existential humility contradicts the fundamentalist spirit of much of contemporary American Christianity. His words were less a declaration of truth than an invitation to introspection, a call to examine your conscience.

Consider the contrast between the pope’s reluctance to consign believers in other faiths to hell (much less his willingness to embrace the idea that non-Christians can “arrive at God”) or to take sides in American politics with the willingness of many Christians to declare even fellow believers as lost forever if they hold different views on abortion or the 2024 election.

For example, after the Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry expressed support for Harris in part because of her support for abortion rights, Allie Beth Stuckey, an influential evangelical podcaster, said, “Christians in his life should consider him an unbeliever and share the gospel with him.”

That kind of language is deeply dispiriting, and it’s rampant. I should know. I’ve been called a heretic and an unbeliever more times than I can count — not because I deny any core Christian doctrine, but because I have profound political disagreements with a segment of American evangelicalism. To them, my opposition to Trump — or my support for the civil liberties of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans — places me outside the Christian faith. Time and time again, MAGA Christians make the same argument: You cannot be a Christian and vote Democratic.

In a newsletter last year, I addressed the rising tide of fundamentalism within MAGA, and by “fundamentalism” I don’t mean that a specific Christian theology is emerging from MAGA America, but rather that a fundamentalist psychology has taken hold. There are many different forms of fundamentalist theology, but there is one primary fundamentalist mind-set.

Dissenters, by contrast, certainly have their own thoughts and ideas about all of the matters that fundamentalists are certain about, but they’re simply less sure that they’re correct. They leave far more room for grace and disagreement. Fundamentalists often interpret this humility as a lack of conviction, at best, or cowardice at worst.

This division between certainty and humility isn’t simply a divide in Protestantism. It crosses over to Catholicism, to Orthodoxy, and to people of different faiths or no faith at all. I’ve encountered Catholics, atheists, Muslims and Hindus who express the same sense of absolute certainty that you’ll encounter in the most intolerant Presbyterian or Baptist.

The irony, however, is that while Christian fundamentalists will claim to be the people who respect the Bible the most, their certainty contradicts scripture itself. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, for example: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

The Book of Ecclesiastes declares: “He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end.”

Both passages speak to the existence of a permanent, inescapable degree of mystery in this life. There are things we cannot know. In this context, the biblical admonition to “walk humbly with your God” takes on added urgency. Humility is the only rational response when pondering the will of God.

In fact, the necessity of humility is further amplified by one of Christ’s most famous commands: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” My own sense of certainty can harm me; it can lead to harsh judgments of others.

Whether we realize it or not, every believer has made some version of a leap of faith, an idea closely associated with the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Mark Tietjen, the author of “Kierkegaard, Communication and Virtue: Authorship as Edification,” describes the leap of faith as a “leap, not out of reason or against reason.” Instead, one realizes “that forward movement in life is not primarily a function of our rational capacities but our will and our trust.”

Religious orthodoxy is the product of several leaps of faith. As an evangelical Christian who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, I’m not only making a leap to believe in God — or in Christ’s resurrection — but also that the Holy Spirit guided the church fathers who created the canon of Scripture.

We leap and we leap and we leap, but do we ever consider that we’re wrong? Do we see that other people are making different leaps and consider that God might be gracious to them as well?

I don’t mean to say that everyone who disagrees with Francis is a fundamentalist.Reasonable Christians can and do disagree about the scope of God’s grace. But the current pope’s words are close to those of a different pope — John Paul II, hardly anyone’s idea of a liberal.

I grew up uncomfortably fundamentalist, uneasy at my church’s teaching but unsure of the alternative. I was especially plagued by questions about God’s love for all humanity. The idea that our path was the only path did not strike me as obvious. This was especially true when I saw great cruelty in my own community and great virtue in many of the people I’d been taught were apostate.

But when I read John Paul II, I encountered a different idea. “The various religions,” he wrote, arose from a “primordial human openness to God.” He argued something I’d never heard in my church — that Jesus saves even people who don’t believe in him: “It will be in the sincere practice of what is good in their own religious traditions and by following the dictates of their own conscience that the members of other religions respond positively to God’s invitation and receive salvation in Jesus Christ, even while they do not recognize or acknowledge him as their Saviour.”

How different are these words from those of Pope Francis? I do not interpret the current pope as saying that all religions are equally true — after all, they can’t be equally true when they offer competing and incompatible claims about the nature of God. And he is, after all, the leader of the world’s largest Christian church. Jews and Christians disagree about the divinity of Jesus, for example. Rather, what Francis is arguing is that God in his mercy does not reserve his grace or his presence to the adherents of a single faith.

We live in an age of misplaced certainty, when even the smallest expressions of doubt or the slightest of disagreements break institutions and fracture families. Fundamentalists extend their intolerance from theology to ideology.

There’s a key word that both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis used: conscience. Francis tells American Catholics to vote as their conscience dictates. John Paul II sees the individual conscience as a route to knowing God. To respect a person’s conscience isn’t to show weakness or embrace moral relativism. It’s to recognize that God is at work in all human hearts and that existential humility doesn’t contradict religious conviction.

It is a vital aspect of the Christian faith.