1 Corinthians 10:20
But the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.

Reflection
We often take verses about specific situations and apply them to everyone and everything. This misuse of scripture does not respect the writer, the original readers, and the text itself.
The context that Paul was addressing was the situation of Christians living in the Roman Empire. Later in this book, I’ll offer a description of the domination culture of the Empire. In short, the Roman Empire believed that to be human is to seek power over other people. Taking other people’s property, forcing people into slavery, and oppressing others was considered their divine right. They crucified people who resisted their Empire. Imagine the pain, fear, and suffering people experienced in this Domination culture!
The public religions of Rome supported the Empire’s domination culture. They claimed that their culture was of divine origin and operated in divine will. For instance, the Roman Empire promoted the idea that Emperor Augustus was the son of the God Apollo. N. T. Wright writes that “in Paul’s time, emperor worship . . . was springing up all round the Roman empire,” and shrines were increasingly dedicated to the Roman emperor and his family. In this and other passages, Paul was not saying that all other religions are demonic. He was saying that the imperial religion functioned to support theft, enslavement, and murder by claiming divine approval for the Empire. These specific Roman religions, Paul wrote, were destroying people and functioned in a demonic way. When the divine is no longer a source of hope for a better world, the demon of despair overcomes human beings. This analysis could be applied to any wisdom tradition, including Christian ones, that support unjust systems by claiming divine approval.
Both Peter (Acts 10) and Paul (Romans 2) made explicit statements about people of other traditions. Here is Paul’s:

For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness.
Romans 2:13-15a

Paul reminded the Gentile and Jewish Christians that people in other cultures and traditions love the Creator with all their hearts and love their neighbors as themselves–as on these two core teachings hang the instruction of the Torah and the prophets.
This First Corinthians text and others like it should not be understood to be saying that other traditions are by definition wrong, invalid, or evil. Nor was he proposing that Christians are an exclusive in-group. He was saying that we must not take any part in systems that hurt other beings, a call which includes critiquing our own tradition about whether it spurs us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Every tradition includes reform movements, self-critiques, and those who remember how their tradition has fallen short of their values.