There was a social worker in Nigeria who not long ago was visiting a young man in one of the back streets of Lagos. On the bedside of this student he found the following books: the Bible; the Book of Common Prayer, I’m glad to see; the Koran; three copies of Watchtower, the magazine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; a biography of Karl Marx; a book of yoga exercises; and a popular paperback that he particularly needed entitled How to Stop Worrying. That is typical of the modern mood, a mood of syncretism and of pluralism. The correct name for this aspect of postmodernism is pluralism. Pluralism does not just affirm the obvious fact that there is a plurality of cultures and ideologies and religions in the world. It goes beyond that. It says that all these claims should be respected equally, and we must therefore affirm the independent validity of every religion and every ideology. We must therefore give up the naïve and arrogant notion that we should try to convert anybody, let alone try to convert everybody. To those …