Q: Beauty may be “in the eye of the beholder,” but what about religion? It’s incredible to me how many people today create their own sets of beliefs. It’s as if they see religion as a cafeteria. They go in with a tray and fill it with what they want. Of course, they don’t pick up anything that might negatively impact them. It’s as if they say to themselves, “I’ll take some grace, love, favor. I’m not going to put judgment on my tray, though; don’t need that! I’ll take some heaven for dessert. Done. Now I can lead my life the way I want.” What do you think of this?— A.

A: The label “Cafeteria Christian,” or for that matter, “Cafeteria (fill in any religion)” was coined to describe people who pick and choose the beliefs and rituals they like in a religion, while leaving out others. I understand your frustration over this trend.

Buddhism has a belief called “Dependent Co-Origination” (pratityasamudpaya), meaning each idea depends upon other ideas and is inseparable from them. I agree. Judgment and grace, justice and mercy, the purity of diet and the purity of thought, all depend on each other for their essential meaning. When we rip them out of their seamless context, the spiritual coherence of the entire religion can suffer. The point of faith is not just to pander to our existing beliefs and practices, but to challenge us to grow and embrace and understand the parts of our religion that at first seem alien.

In any case, I think you should open your mind, heart and soul to people who just aren’t able to dive into the deep end of the spiritual pool. You have something to teach them about the important unity of religious beliefs, but they have something to teach you about the importance of free will and progressive revelation.

The free will issue is central to all people of mature faith. No one can say he or she adheres to a particular religion just because they were born into that faith. At some point, if we’re to make our faith truly our own, we must choose it. Einstein is reputed to have said that his one regret about being born a Jew was that he didn’t have the opportunity to choose to be Jewish.

The free choosing of faith is what I most admire about adult baptism. Confirmation during the teen years—common in many faiths—strikes me as too early. There’s a bunch of living we all must do before we can freely and maturely choose to embrace God and the wisdom tradition of a particular faith. The “Cafeteria Christians” you deride may just be people who haven’t yet come to the free will choosing of a specific faith.

The most challenging aspect of “Cafeteria Christianity” is the possibility that adherents are right in leaving behind certain beliefs and practices. The idea here is that God offers religious traditions, not one fixed revelation—but a revelation that is augmented over time with new revelations about how God wants us to live in the world.

Many people leave behind on the theological cafeteria line the old teachings about the role of women, the condemnation of homosexuality, teachings prohibiting certain forms of birth control, and dietary laws in favor of vegetarianism. Old religious teachings in some places justified slavery and discrimination, and leaving such teachings behind was a good thing.

I’m not passing judgment here on any particular element of faith picked up or left behind. What I am saying is that sometimes people can distort the will and words of God, but in time, the new and real meaning of our faith becomes clear. God was not through with us in the first century.

The final lesson I hope you can learn from “Cafeteria Christians” is that they will all be going through the line again. The things left behind at the breakfast time of their lives may be picked up at lunch or suppertime. Just because a person can’t accept a belief or practice now doesn’t mean he or she won’t accept it later.

If we only accepted into our houses of worship those who took every dish, we’d have some very lonely feasts.

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