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One commonality among essentially all immigrants to the United States has been an Abrahamic faith, or at least little to no expression of religious faith outside the Abrahamic sphere among political and cultural elite. This has a useful function of allowing everyone to appeal to God and they are essentially appealing to the same figure- smoothing over religious differences and providing a point of reference for authority. The mass immigration of Hindus, on the other hand, sticks out like a sore thumb. When a Hindu appeals to God on the RNC stage I have no idea what he means. But also when a Hindu (Kash Patel) tells a Protestant (Charlie Kirk) "I’ll see you in Valhalla" it is somehow even more incoherent.
How can/should Hindus appeal to the divine and the afterlife in public pleasantries like this? Should they invoke their own religious mythos? Or should they just appeal to "God" even though they are not talking about the same literary figure(s) as everyone else? Should/are they all going to convert to Christianity? Seems unlikely. They should probably just avoid this trap altogether although that's difficult to do for a Conservative constituency.
I mean, that would have still made sense coming from a protestant. Kash Patel is trying to say Charlie Kirk was a warrior for his side, who died a warrior's death. Whether it landed or not is a separate issue.
I feel like this issue already played out in the Greater Indian sphere, with the end result being that Muslims in that sphere grudgingly accepted Hindus as People of the Book. You can see this today in the weird Islamicized version of Hinduism supposedly practiced in Bali.
Granted, that's a slightly easier posture to adopt in Islam, where the Quran says God has sent prophets to every nation. If you already accept that Judaism and Christianity are corrupted forms of Islam (with mainstream Christianity even having polytheism/shirk from an Islamic perspective), why not accept that Hinduism is a super corrupted form of a true revelation sent from God?
From an orthodox Christian perspective, Hinduism is demon worship writ large. And while the British were practical enough to not actually convert the Indian subcontinent to Christianity, it sits uneasily in the Christian sphere.
I think a compromise invocation of "God" probably works okay (since there are monotheistic sects of Hinduism, and the nature of logical identity is that if there is a God, they're all the same god), but things get dicier when you start to get to the exact specifics of what state Charlie Kirk's soul is in from a Hindu perspective. (He presumably hasn't achieved Moksha or some other higher spiritual state, so he's still part of Samsara, and thus reincarnated based on his karma.) I think referring to secular legacy elements might be the safest compromise. Something like, "You'll live on in our hearts and minds, and in the amazing legacy you've left behind for all of us, but especially for your wife and two kids."
While this works in practice I don't think it's a question of logical identity. Every major religious movement that believes in a single God also tends to ascribe some overlapping characteristics and roles to that figure, but that's more of an observation about the sorts of gods people want to believe in, or indeed, if you're spiritually-minded, about what the real elephant is probably like.
If there were a religion who believed in a single deity that's radically unlike the Abrahamic God in all particulars - didn't create the world or humanity, isn't benevolent, isn't the source of morality, is not absolutely in charge of the cosmos, isn't anything close to omnipotent - I don't think it would make sense to talk about them as worshiping "the same God" as Christians and Muslims and even Zoroastrians. If there are non-ironic Satanists who believe that Satan exists but God doesn't, does their horned fiery guy count as an analogue to the Christian Devil, or the Christian God? I think the answer to that is fairly obvious.
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