Latter-day Saints often teach that their
church is “the only true and living Church upon the face of the whole earth”
(D&C 1:30) and because of this they may eschew engagement with other
religions. However, engagement with other religions does not have to be for the
purpose of agreement. Neither does an exclusivist belief have to exclude a person
or faith from the inter-faith table. Tom Greggs has argued that sitting down
with these differing and even contradictory beliefs laid out and emphasized
rather than hidden actually better serves inter-faith dialogue:
To sit at the inter-faith table without this
fact, painful as it may be in the face of the other, is to engage in a
dishonest dialogue dishonestly. Our very need to sit together is grounded not
only in what we hare but—and herein lies the rub—in the differences we have. A
number of very real dangers can arise from various quarters if this is ignored.
There is, first, the danger that we sit down not as the other but as the same
and thus do not sit down as religious people wishing to engage in dialogue at
all. By this is meant that if we gather together around shared values (perhaps
associated with one of many shades of social liberalism), we do not gather
together primarily identifying as people of particular faiths but only
secondarily so: we can run the danger of actually gathering together as people
who are united by a (for all the vagueness of this term) liberal agenda,
through which we then see our own faith . . . This leads to a second danger.
This is that we do not engage in dialogue but in mutual agreement and “head nodding.”
Without confronting the painful reality of the exclusive ultimates that we have
(however inclusive these may be), we run the risk of entering into the kind of
universalizing in which modernity has engaged in its understanding of religion—seeing
ourselves as all the same and not, therefore presenting the at times
problematic elements of the coexistence of our faiths in the religiously and
socially heterogeneous communities of which we are a part. (Tom Greggs, “Bringing
Barth’s Critique of Religions to the Inter-faith Table,” Journal of Religion, 88(1), 75-94, here, pp. 81-82) (James D. Holt, Towards a Latter-day Saint Theology of Religions [2020], 7-8)
