How One Encounter with Hinduism Changed My Life Forever
By Melissa Cain Travis | Bulletin Roundtable
In this month’s Roundtable discussion, the team is tackling topics related to other religions (see Part 1 by Paul Copan on Islam, Part 2 by Paul Gould on differences related to salvation between Christianity and other religions, and Part 3 by David Baggett on Mormon views of the Trinity). Melissa Cain Travis concludes the series below, telling the story of her first real encounter with a non-Christian religion, and her introduction to apologetics.
For the Kingdom,
Christopher Reese
Editor-in-Chief
For the first twenty-two years of my life, I had virtually zero experience with non-Christian religious beliefs. I knew plenty of people who practiced no faith at all (but would likely have claimed Christianity if asked to check a box on a document), but in the rural South of the ‘80s and ‘90s, there simply weren’t many opportunities to meet and converse with people of other religions. Throughout my years in the public school system, I was never aware of having a teacher or fellow student of a different faith. Occasionally, I would hear whispered gossip about how someone in our community had been “converted” by Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I knew very little about the heresies involved. I went on to attend a Christian university where most students identified as Christians, and those who did not (mostly those who were there on international scholarships) had their own tight social cliques. I remember a handful of conversations with a student from India, a guy who was playing the dating field before he had to return home, go to medical school, and submit to an arranged marriage. I didn’t question him about his faith, mainly because he never talked about it. Honestly, I had no idea how to initiate a conversation like that; I knew my beliefs would seem as foreign to him as his would to me.
In the fall of 1999, several months after completing my undergraduate degree in biology, my husband and I stunned our families by moving over a thousand miles away to the big city of Houston, Texas. I spent our first few months in the city working for a genetics lab in the enormous Houston medical center, and it was pure culture shock. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people of different belief systems—outspoken atheists, a liberal Lutheran pastor’s wife who advocated for gay clergy, cultural Catholics, Buddhists, and one extremely shy Baptist who kept to herself. I regarded this as an opportunity to prove my worth as a Christian, so I began talking openly about my faith. To put it mildly, I crashed and burned. I couldn’t respond to claims about the unreliability of Scripture, religious pluralism, alternative views of sexuality, or the moral permissibility of abortion. I had no good arguments for major tenets of Christianity, particularly its exclusivity. I felt like an utter failure.
In need of a better income (I was putting my husband through school at the time), I accepted a job offer at a biotech startup company, where I ran a small lab alongside another recent college graduate named Raj. He was soft-spoken and very kind, which gave me the courage to inquire about his religious beliefs. We had several conversations about his Hinduism, which he characterized as wonderfully all-inclusive: “I believe everyone pursuing God is climbing up the same mountain, just from different sides. We’re all moving upward to the same goal.” When I objected that Jesus claimed to be the exclusive way to God, Raj responded that Jesus was a holy man, a god who is the way for some people. I was at a loss for how to respond to this pluralistic, relativistic view.
As I floundered in my miserable ineptitude, the Holy Spirit came to my rescue. One day, during my lunch break, I walked over to the Barnes and Noble across the street. I’d always enjoyed browsing their bargain shelves for random treasures. That day, as I wandered up and down those few aisles hoping to score a cool art book or something, a book on an eye-level shelf caught my attention. It was a glossy gold hardback with a red clearance price sticker reading $9.95. The cover image was a judge’s gavel, and the title was The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict: Evidence I & II Fully Updated in One Volume to Answer Questions Challenging Christians in the 21st Century. I’d never heard of the author, Josh McDowell. I picked up the book and flipped it over to read the synopsis, and as I did so, the world shifted beneath my feet. Why hadn’t anyone told me, in my twenty-three years in the Christian community (including four in a Christian university), that there was an entire academic discipline devoted to the logical and evidential defense of Christianity? On the first page of the introduction, I encountered the term “apologetics” for the first time in my life.
At home that evening, I began devouring the content of that book, and soon after shared some of what I was learning with Raj during downtime at the lab. I focused quite a bit on the problem with the “Oprah Winfrey philosophy of religion” as I jokingly called it—the idea that all religions lead to the same higher power, that there are many paths to God. Using what I’d gleaned from McDowell, I pointed out that belief systems that make conflicting claims about God and how to know him can’t all be true, based upon the law of non-contradiction. Since Raj was a man of science, he should have rejected Hinduism’s anti-scientific and self-defeating claim that human reason cannot be trusted and that we are immersed in a world rife with illusion.
I confess that my conversational technique wasn’t great, nor was my objective entirely honorable; I essentially began treating Raj like my pet project. I was sincerely concerned for his soul, but I also wanted to prove that I was right. Perhaps he became annoyed by my attempts to change his mind (he was too polite to say so), but a few times he did raise his eyebrows and tilt his head to one side in consideration of something I’d said (or read aloud from the book). Within a year, Raj left the lab to enter dental school, and we didn’t stay in touch. I hope I at least put a little pebble in his shoe. Even if my fumbling early attempts at evangelistic apologetics didn’t do anything to shake his Hindu faith, my life was profoundly changed by one momentous day in a secular bookstore and the months of study and conversation that followed.
—Melissa Cain Travis, PhD, is a Distinguished Fellow of Great Books and Philosophy at Southeastern University and an Affiliate Faculty at Colorado Christian University. She is the author of Science and the Mind of the Maker: What the Conversation Between Faith and Science Reveals About God (Harvest House, 2018) and Thinking God’s Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility (forthcoming, Roman Roads Press, 2022).
Image by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay
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