Coexist
Photo by Noah Holm on Unsplash
It is easy to spot Coexist bumper stickers in the wild. Their native habitat is Whole Foods parking lots, on the rear of a car that could only belong to someone who swears by fair trade coffee, has reusable tote bags ready to go, and attended at least one meditation retreat.
It’s all there, a tidy package—like some divine algorithm solved the world’s problems with graphic design and a little adhesive. There’s no need for holy wars or centuries of spiritual debate; stick it on your Subaru Outback and call it a day. Voilà! Spiritual unity achieved and peace on Earth!
The 'Coexist' sticker presents a well-intentioned yet superficial sentiment. It attempts to encapsulate the noble ideal of religious harmony by spelling out 'COEXIST' through the symbols of various spiritual traditions. By reducing each tradition to a simple visual representation, the slogan dilutes the essence of every creed it claims to honor. This reduction strips these religions of their distinctiveness, intellectual rigor, and intrinsic beauty.
RLB Ident 2024
The idea behind the sticker is attractive. With religious conflict rampant across the globe, who could object to the call for peace and tolerance between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists alike? This attractiveness—this irresistible appeal to the lowest common denominator—should not deter us from questioning the effectiveness of such a simple, universally appealing depiction as a tool for addressing centuries of violence.
The symbols that form the word 'Coexist' celebrate religiosity: the crescent of Islam, the Star of David, the cross of Christianity, the yin-yang of Taoism, and so on. When these images are combined to promote a secular mantra, they lose their depth and become aesthetic flourishes. It's as if the world’s spiritual traditions have been reduced to ornaments devoid of doctrinal weight, meaning, or truth. Trivialization trivializes. Who wants to be trivialized?
The cross is the emblem of the Christian faith that believes and proclaims that Christ was more than a wise teacher or moral leader but the incarnate God who took on human flesh, suffered, died, and rose again to redeem humanity from sin. The cross is the ultimate paradox: suffering and salvation, death and resurrection, God and man entwined in an eternal dance of grace. To place it alongside symbols from other traditions, under the implied equivalence of “coexistence,” is to empty the cross of its scandalous particularity.
The same must be said of the Islamic crescent: it is the grand arc of submission to God’s will, the call to prayer, and the meditative rhythm of reciting the Quran. Islam’s beauty is its order and the oneness of God—tawhid. And here it lingers, reduced to just one piece of a word in a secular creed. Gone is the deep surrender, the cleansing power of Ramadan, the discipline of the Five Pillars. The crescent, separated from its context, is like a dismembered verse, plucked out of the Holy Book and tossed on a bumper.
The problem is not that these religions need to clash but that by reducing them to a logo, the Coexist sticker undermines what makes each unique. The drive for superficial harmony risks promoting a relativism that compromises the seriousness of all religious claims. Each faith tradition asserts some understanding of the ultimate truth when taken seriously. That they differ—and sometimes drastically—does not mean that they must be at odds in the civil sphere, but it does mean that these differences are irrelevant if misrepresented. If one believes in absolute truth, as the significant monotheistic religions do, then that belief cannot easily be reconciled with the idea that “all paths lead to the same place.” Such thinking is not only intellectually lazy; it is deeply offensive to those for whom religious belief is more than a private hobby.
The world’s great religions offer competing metaphysical claims and distinctive visions of what it means to flourish as a person. With its focus on the dissolution of the self, Buddhism contrasts dramatically with Christianity’s affirmation of the soul’s eternal worth. Judaism’s covenantal understanding of moral obligation before God presents a radically different picture of the human condition compared to Hinduism’s vision of karma and reincarnation. At their best, these traditions are collections of wisdom, mystery, and beauty—each reflecting something profound about humanity and the divine. To imagine that these diverse paths can be reduced to a single sentiment is not an elevation of these faiths but a diminishment of them.
The great irony of the Coexist sticker is that it attempts to champion diversity while promoting a form of intellectual and spiritual homogenization. It takes the most profound expressions of belief and reduces them to slogans as if centuries of philosophical and theological development could be distilled into a single letter. It is a sign of our cultural impatience with complexity. We do not want to wrestle with the deep questions of life and death; we want to feel good and congratulate ourselves on our open-mindedness.
The hard truth is that honest dialogue with those who believe differently than we do requires more than a bumper sticker. It takes an acknowledgment of difference, a willingness to debate and disagree, and a respect for the seriousness of belief. Only when we understand the profound differences between our traditions can we begin to have the kind of dialogue that moves beyond platitudes.