Academia Letters, December 2020.
Self-described post-liberal thinkers such as Paul J. Griffiths (2001, 2007), and Jerome Gell-
man (2000) bid philosophers of religion to accept attitudes of religious exclusivism as just
one among other aspects of religious particularity that persons reasonably adopt as part of
a religious indentity. This reasoning may seem initially plausible, but on closer inspection
I hink that the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity falls apart.
There is no reason to support either the “full rationality” that Gellman wants us to credit
contented religious exclusivists with, nor the reasonableness of the “polemical apologetics”
which Griffiths bids the embrace of. I aim in this letter to undercut apologetic strategies which
serve to support as Griffiths does in An Apology for Apologetics, a normalization of “inter-
religious polemics”.
