Our 726 respondents, collectively, agree with the pluralist assertion that all religions can teach people to be good (Question 1) and the exclusivist claim that Christian teachings are the only correct ones (Question 2). They generally do not agree that all non-Christians are going to hell (Question 5), thus showing a patently pluralist attitude towards the salvation of people of other faiths. Yet a majority of them still hope that non-Christians will convert to the Christian faith (Question 6), an exclusivist concern that is strongly supported by the respondents' strong commitment to evangelism (Question 7). When it comes to participation in Buddhist rites, the majority of the respondents take the exclusivist attitude that it is wrong for Christians to participate in most of those rites (Questions 11, 12, and 13), and they have strong feelings of antipathy towards participation (Question 14). The pattern we have discerned is that the respondents tend towards ideological pluralism and behavioral exclusivism. We must insist on the words "tend towards" because in every case where there is a pluralist or exclusivist majority on any particular question there too is found its opposite, sometimes nearly as large as the majority although occasionally surviving as only a tiny fraction of the sample. So long as we preserve the words "tend towards," we can conclude with some confidence that northern Thai Protestants show tendencies towards both exclusivism and pluralism, and we can discern a logic, a pattern to those tendencies.

Explaining the logic and the pattern is less easy. It seems evident, however, that northern Thai Protestants have preserved important ideological and behavioral attitudes from each of their two traditions and sought to accommodate those two sets of attitudes to each other. First, their Theravada Buddhist heritage has taught them that correct religious behavior, orthopraxy, is more important than correct religious thinking, orthodoxy. Our respondents, thus, have some freedom to think in ways quite different from their Protestant theological heritage with its massive emphasis on right belief as the foundation of a saving faith. While ideological exclusivism is still present in no small degree, it does not have a particular hold on the personal attitudes of the majority of the respondents. Second, the respondents' Protestant Christian heritage has instilled in them, as we have already seen, a strong fear of idolatry and an antipathy to the religious practices of northern Thai Buddhism. That fear defines for the respondents what it means to behave properly.

In his essay, "Universal and Local Elements in Religion" (in Religious Inventions: Four Essays. Cambridge, 1997, 81-104), Max Charlesworth states that every religious tradition has both universal and local elements and that, "both the universal element and the local element are essential in religion." (page 103). He argues that every religious tradition needs to find a balance between the universal and local because swinging too far in either direction leads to a break down of the tradition, a loss of its central themes and concerns. He also notes that religious traditions pass through cycles in which first the universalizing, centralizing elements and then the localizing, fragmenting elements are predominate.

Northern Thai Protestantism reflects just this mix of universal and local elements with one significant difference. Northern Thai Protestants have two sets of universal elements and two sets of local elements rather than one. Their tradition is heir to Universal Buddhism and Universal Protestantism and daily situates itself in proximity to local, village Buddhism and within its own local Protestant church community. Overtly, of course, northern Thai Protestant churches do not claim and even reject Universal and local Buddhism as settings for the development of Protestant thought and practice. Yet, equally of course, in fact of daily life they cannot escape either, all the more because Buddhism has helped to shape the values that they share with all northern Thais.

Out of the complicated mix of universal and local, Protestant and Buddhist, northern Thai Protestants shape their own range of personal theologies and personal ways of behaving. There is sufficient diversity and "local-istity" in the way they mix and match these universal and local themes from the two traditions so that it is difficult to reach clear, solid conclusions about how they accommodate each to the others. There is, at the same time, sufficient universality in the process so that we can conclude, very broadly, that northern Thai Protestants tend to think more like their Buddhist neighbors in some ways and to behave more like their Protestant compatriots in the West in other ways. That is to say that northern Thai Protestantism, if the 726 respondents to our questionnaire are any measure, is a new creation. Northern Thai Protestants, today, do not think like traditional missionary teachings taught converts to think, and it is not clear that the majority of them ever did. At the same time, northern Thai Protestants do not think like their Buddhist neighbors and relatives, again if our sample is any measure. They are not as comfortable with religious pluralism as is their culture generally. They are particularly uneasy about how they should deal with participation in Buddhist rites, a patently exclusivist issue made all the more difficult by the pluralist expectations of those same Buddhist neighbors and relatives.

Perhaps the vitality and integrity of the manner in which northern Thai Protestants, speaking here specifically of those within the Church of Christ in Thailand, have accommodated their dual heritages to each other is the fact that no one around them accepts the result. Their Buddhist neighbors and even leading religious thinkers in Thailand criticize them for behaving in ways that are disrespectful of their neighbors of other faiths. Evangelical missionaries from other countries criticize them for being too syncretistic. Ecumenical missionaries criticize them for being too isolated from their own culture. I was once approached by a mission agency connected to the CCT asking my thoughts on how to go about creating a Thai church that is "really Thai." I asked the representatives of that agency if that was what they really wanted, and when they said that it was I reminded them that any truly Thai church is going to be heretical by the measure of most Western missionaries, even those who consider themselves ecumenicals. This mission agency was implicitly judging the Thai church as it stands today as being inadequate to the task of evangelizing Thailand because it is too foreign in appearance. That attitude, so far as I can see, is based on a failure to understand the issues facing anyone, any group that seeks to be at once Protestant and Thai, two heritages that are traditionally diametrically opposed to each other on the basic issues of how people are "saved," who is "saved," and what salvation even means. They are in particular tension with each other in their almost polar opposite attitudes towards other religions and towards people of other faiths. It is not easy to find any middle ground between these two traditions, but that is the task set before anyone who is going to be both northern Thai and Christian. That is the task we have been looking at in this study.