Universal religion?

in their book on religious ceremonies, Bernard and Picart brought out similarities between Western religious practices and those found in Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. As the authors of The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (213-4) summarize it: “Circumcision could be found in the Yucatan; the ‘savages’ of Canada believe in the devil and a God who created all things. Other parallels could be established among the religions of the East and between those beliefs and the sources of Western religion. The followers of Fo (the Buddha) believe him to be their savior, and the Brahmins (an upper caste of Hundus) gave him the name of Ram. Finally, among the ancient peoples Fo may have been understood as being either Pythagoras or the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. The Chinese and the Japanese also have a single philosopher who is the font of their religions wisdom, and he, too, appears to be related to Fo. All seem to have a belief in a Supreme Being or a Master of Heaven.”

These similarities were intended to, and did, undermine the absolute claims of Christianity. But why would that be? Why couldn’t these similarities instead be taken as evidence of wide diffusion of truth? Christian thinkers of the seventeenth century had learned a good deal about both Native American and the far East, but they were able to incorporate this new data into a Christian understanding of history and religion. What was different in the eighteenth century was not new data but the framework for evaluating that data.