Religious Assimilationism
ELI5
It's when someone says "all religions are equal and teach the same thing," but what they actually mean, deep down, is "all religions are valuable because they point toward my religion." The openness is fake — there's a hidden favorite that quietly serves as the measuring stick.
Definition
Religious Assimilationism names the structural operation by which an ostensibly universalist or ecumenical religious position secretly organizes its openness around a particular — and hidden — benchmark. In the case diagnosed in philosophy-and-theology-london-england-weil-simone-rozelle-stone-adrian-rebecca, Simone Weil's claim that all religious traditions equally reflect a single transcendent Truth is exposed as crypto-assimilationist: non-Christian religions are admitted into the universal only to the degree that they anticipate Christian theological categories (incarnation, the Holy Spirit). The "universality" on offer is thus not an empty, contentless universal but one secretly filled by a specific particular — Christianity — which functions as the covert standard against which all others are measured and found either preparatory or deficient. This is a logic of false universalism: the universal posture is retained as rhetorical cover while a particular content colonizes its interior.
This structure maps precisely onto what Lacanian and Hegelian critical theory identifies as the ideological operation of particularism masquerading as universalism. The genuinely universal, in this tradition, would be constituted by an absence, a void, a structural incompleteness that no single particular can fill. Religious Assimilationism forecloses that void by suturing the universal to one tradition's positive content, rendering what presents itself as ecumenical tolerance into an asymmetric, hierarchical identification in which the non-Christian is always already measured against, and found to be merely an intimation of, the Christian.
Place in the corpus
This concept appears in philosophy-and-theology-london-england-weil-simone-rozelle-stone-adrian-rebecca (p.49) as a critical diagnosis of Simone Weil's theological method. It lives at the intersection of the cross-referenced concepts of Universalism vs. Particularism, Truth, and Identification. With respect to Universalism vs. Particularism, Religious Assimilationism is a specification of the broader ideological problem: a universalist claim that, on structural inspection, is revealed to be a particular content dressed in universal clothing. The canonical account of particularism in the corpus warns that abandoning genuine universality leaves only isolated, local standards; Religious Assimilationism is precisely this failure — the universal is preserved in name only, secretly filled by a Christian particular. With respect to Truth, the concept has a double valence: Weil's stated position (all religions equally reflect one Truth) operates at the level of the statement, while the assimilationist structure operates at the level of enunciation — what is "really said" is that truth is Christian truth, with other traditions valued only as its foreshadowings. The canonical definition of Truth insists it is constitutively not-whole and cannot be monopolized by any positive content; Religious Assimilationism is precisely the refusal of that incompleteness.
With respect to Identification, the assimilationist structure functions analogously to imaginary identification: non-Christian traditions are recognized only insofar as they mirror back the Christian image — they are identified with the Ideal Ego of Christian theology rather than encountered in their own singularity. The canonical definitions of both Singularity and Sublimation are implicitly at stake: a genuine religious universalism would require attending to the irreducible singularity of each tradition (what cannot be assimilated to a Christian benchmark), whereas Religious Assimilationism performs a kind of failed sublimation — it raises Christianity to the dignity of the Thing, the universal void, but fills that void with positive theological content rather than leaving it structurally open.
Key formulations
Simone Weil and Theology (p.49)
she departs from this position and adopts a more typical attempt to value non-Christian religions on the basis of their intimations of Christianity
The phrase "value non-Christian religions on the basis of their intimations of Christianity" is theoretically loaded because "intimations" exposes the hierarchical temporality concealed within Weil's ecumenism: non-Christian traditions are not acknowledged on their own terms but only as anticipatory, preparatory, or derivative gestures toward a Christian telos, making Christianity the covert master-signifier around which the entire pseudo-universal structure is organized.