The Myth of “Moderation” in Religion
The idea that any one of our religions
represents the infallible word of the One
True God requires an encyclopedic
ignorance of history, mythology, and art
even to be entertained—as the beliefs,
rituals, and iconography of each of our
religions attest to centuries of
crosspollination among them. Whatever
their imagined source, the doctrines of
modern religions are no more tenable than
those which, for lack of adherents, were
cast upon the scrap heap of mythology
millennia ago; for there is no more evidence
to justify a belief in the literal existence of
Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep
Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or
Poseidon churning the seas.
According to Gallup, 35 percent of
Americans believe that the Bible is the literal
and inerrant word of the Creator of the
universe. Another 48 percent believe that it
is the “inspired” word of the same—still
inerrant, though certain of its passages
must be interpreted symbolically before
their truth can be brought to light. Only 17
percent of us remain to doubt that a
personal God, in his infinite wisdom, is likely
to have authored this text—or, for that
matter, to have created the earth with its
250,000 species of beetles. Some 46
percent of Americans take a literalist view
of creation (40 percent believe that God has
guided creation over the course of millions
of years). This means that 120 million of us
place the big bang 2,500 years after the
Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew
beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly
230 million Americans believe that a book
showing neither unity of style nor internal
consistency was authored by an
omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent
deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews
around the world would surely yield similar
results, revealing that we, as a species, have
grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our
myths. How is it that, in this one area of our
lives, we have convinced ourselves that our
beliefs about the world can float entirely
free of reason and evidence?
It is with respect to this rather surprising
cognitive scenery that we must decide what
it means to be a religious “moderate” in the
twenty-first century. Moderates in every
faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or
simply ignore) much of their canons in the
interests of living in the modern world. No
doubt an obscure truth of economics is at
work here: societies appear to become
considerably less productive whenever
large numbers of people stop making
widgets and begin killing their customers
and creditors for heresy. The first thing to
observe about the moderate’s retreat from
scriptural literalism is that it draws its
inspiration not from scripture but from
cultural developments that have rendered
many of God’s utterances difficult to accept
as written. In America, religious moderation
is further enforced by the fact that most
Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in
its entirety and consequently have no idea
just how vigorously the God of Abraham
wants heresy expunged. One look at the
book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has
something very specific in mind should
your son or daughter return from yoga
class advocating the worship of Krishna:
If your brother, the son of your father or
of your mother, or your son or daughter,
or the spouse whom you embrace, or
your most intimate friend, tries to
secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go
and serve other gods,” unknown to you
or your ancestors before you, gods of
the peoples surrounding you, whether
near you or far away, anywhere
throughout the world, you must not
consent, you must not listen to him; you
must show him no pity, you must not
spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you
must kill him, your hand must strike the
first blow in putting him to death and
the hands of the rest of the people
following. You must stone him to death,
since he has tried to divert you from
Yahweh your God. . . .(Deuteronomy
13:7-11)
While the stoning of children for heresy has
fallen out of fashion in our country, you will
not hear a moderate Christian or Jew
arguing for a “symbolic” reading of
passages of this sort. (In fact, one seems to
be explicitly blocked by God himself in
Deuteronomy 13:1—“Whatever I am now
commanding you, you must keep and
observe, adding nothing to it, taking
nothing away.”) The above passage is as
canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only
by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good
Book can be reconciled with life in the
modern world. This is a problem for
“moderation” in religion: it has nothing
underwriting it other than the
unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the
divine law.
The only reason anyone is “moderate” in
matters of faith these days is that he has
assimilated some of the fruits of the last
two thousand years of human thought
(democratic politics, scientific advancement
on every front, concern for human rights,
an end to cultural and geographic isolation,
etc.).

The only reason anyone is “moderate” in
matters of faith these days is that he has
assimilated some of the fruits of the last
two thousand years of human thought
(democratic politics, scientific advancement
on every front, concern for human rights,
an end to cultural and geographic isolation,
etc.).

Interesting OP. However 2000 years of human thought is not the 'only reason anyone is "moderate" in matters of faith'. In fact it could be argued otherwise that religious fanaticism is a result of social crises that occur every now and again in a societies history. It is probably moderation that is the norm.

Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

Galatians: 4:24

People have been reading the bible symbolically since a long time it is not only in this modern era.

The doors leading out of scriptural
literalism do not open from the inside. The
moderation we see among
nonfundamentalists is not some sign that
faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the
product of the many hammer blows of
modernity that have exposed certain tenets
of faith to doubt. Not the least among these
developments has been the emergence of
our tendency to value evidence and to be
convinced by a proposition to the degree
that there is evidence for it. Even most
fundamentalists live by the lights of reason
in this regard; it is just that their minds
seem to have been partitioned to
accommodate the profligate truth claims of
their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his
wife is cheating on him, or that frozen
yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is
likely to require as much evidence as
anyone else, and to be persuaded only to
the extent that you give it. Tell him that the
book he keeps by his bed was written by
an invisible deity who will punish him with
fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every
incredible claim about the universe, and he
seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Religious moderation springs from the fact
that even the least educated person among
us simply knows more about certain
matters than anyone did two thousand
years ago—and much of this knowledge is
incompatible with scripture. Having heard
something about the medical discoveries of
the last hundred years, most of us no
longer equate disease processes with sin or
demonic possession. Having learned about
the known distances between objects in
our universe, most of us (about half of us,
actually) find the idea that the whole works
was created six thousand years ago (with
light from distant stars already in transit
toward the earth) impossible to take
seriously. Such concessions to modernity do
not in the least suggest that faith is
compatible with reason, or that our
religious traditions are in principle open to
new learning: it is just that the utility of
ignoring (or “reinterpreting”) certain
articles of faith is now overwhelming.
Anyone being flown to a distant city for
heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly
at least, that we have learned a few things
about physics, geography, engineering, and
medicine since the time of Moses.
So it is not that these texts have maintained
their integrity over time (they haven’t); it is
just that they have been effectively edited
by our neglect of certain of their passages.
Most of what remains—the “good parts”—
has been spared the same winnowing
because we do not yet have a truly modern
understanding of our ethical intuitions and
our capacity for spiritual experience. If we
better understood the workings of the
human brain, we would undoubtedly
discover lawful connections between our
states of consciousness, our modes of
conduct, and the various ways we use our
attention. What makes one person happier
than another? Why is love more conducive
to happiness than hate? Why do we
generally prefer beauty to ugliness and
order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to
smile and laugh, and why do these shared
experiences generally bring people closer
together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so,
what implications does this have for human
life? Is there life after death? These are
ultimately questions for a mature science of
the mind. If we ever develop such a science,
most of our religious texts will be no more
useful to mystics than they now are to
astronomers.