A Living Faith

by Fritz Williams

I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church more than 40 years ago--on the Feast of St. Thomas. I didn't choose that particular feast day for my ordination, but looking back on what's happened to me, I'd say it was a perfect fit. Thomas was one of Jesus' disciples. He's the one who's remembered primarily for being a doubter. Thomas has become my favorite saint. I'm proudly and defiantly a doubting Thomas. Before I believe in something, I want evidence. And I want to make sense of it in terms of everything I know about the world. Yes, I believe in the power of faith. But I also believe in the necessity of doubt.

Faith is an enigma. It's filled with contradictions. We need faith to make it over life's hurdles, but we also have to remember that faith can tempt us into dropping our guard and it can make us more vulnerable. Faith is a source of strength, but there's also an undertow of surrender. Faith can help us find meaning in life, and it can cause us to lose our way. Faith is real, and it is self-delusion. It is something to aspire to, and it something we need to resist.

Frankly, I'm amazed at the things people say they believe in. In almost any survey you can think of, more than 90% of Americans say they believe in God. A famous 1996 Gallup poll on Religion in America reported that 96% of American adults believe in God and 90% believe in heaven. In that same poll, 83% said they believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and 35% said they believe every word is literally and absolutely true. In a recent poll, more than half of the respondents said they believe in angels, and roughly half said they've experienced a miracle that God has done. These are impressive statistics. They are glimpses of a world of faith that borders on mass insanity.

It depresses me to realize how people seem to think faith like this is something we ought to admire and emulate. Psychologists have profiled the personality traits of believers and unbelievers, and their findings don't make religious faith look all that virtuous. People tend to assume that skeptics and unbelievers are pessimists and that people of faith have a more optimistic outlook on life. But psychological profiles based on detailed questionnaires turn these assumptions upside down. It turns out that skeptics and unbelievers are more open-minded and adventurous than people of faith and that believers are more fearful and pessimistic. In these profiles, religious faith looks like an escape hatch from the challenges of life and doubt like a doorway to exploration and discovery.

I admire emotional openness--a soft heart and an ability to identify with the hurts and hopes of others. They're the emotional building blocks of an ethical life. But belief in God does not correlate strongly with these qualities either.

These irrational dimensions of our everyday lives may seem harmless. It's a tough world, and maybe a little credulity and faith will make life more tolerable. But there's a dark side to faith, too. It shows up when believers close ranks and become defensive and doctrinaire. You can see it when they rally behind religious authority figures and charismatic leaders. The dark side of faith is evident when parents who believe in faith healing deny their children access to medical treatment. Or when believers gather around a cult leader like Jim Jones or David Koresh, and human beings are poisoned or incinerated.

The dedication of conservative Christians to anti-gay, pro-life, creationist agendas has taken on the character of a national religious cult. Religious leaders have torn these issues out of their Biblical and historical contexts, and they've turned them into righteous causes and litmus tests of moral orthodoxy. I've often been impressed by the cultic quality of conservative talk radio--the cult-like relationship between Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mike Savage and their disciples--manipulating them, talking down to them, rallying them to the cause. It's scary, but for a significant army of supporters, George W. Bush has assumed the role of conservative high priest and cult leader

I read lots of liberal and humanist publications. I subscribe to The Humanist and Free Inquiry. I get The Nation, Progressive, and The American Prospect. Day after day I'm exposed to journalists, scholars, and social critics who are carrying the banner of reason in a culture war against the armies of faith.

I've read countless articles spelling out the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and showing why creationism doesn't belong in science classrooms. I've read many articles documenting the crimes and horrors people have committed in the name of religion through the centuries. I've read articles on how science has expanded our understanding of the world, and how it's had to fight religion all the way. I've read articles on how much better off we would be if we took a rational approach to contemporary problems rather than a religious one.

I agree with most of the points these articles make. I admire a lot of the writing. But unfortunately, the arguments aren't connecting with the people they're arguing against. These writers may as well be talking to themselves. It's amazing how stupid these smart people can be. Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift warned that we shouldn't try to argue people out of beliefs they didn't argue themselves into in the first place. Believers are not relating to the world in a way that is basically rational, and confronting them with carefully reasoned arguments as if both sides were engaged in an academic debate is almost silly. In fact, most confrontations between partisans of reason and partisans of faith have merely had the effect of solidifying our differences and reinforcing the prejudices we have about one another.

I think it's time for reasonable people to spend less energy arguing over specific points of disagreement and to start paying more attention to the phenomenon of faith. We need to ask ourselves: What is faith and how is it nurtured? How does faith affect people mentally and emotionally? What are the positive functions of faith in building community and in sustaining individual lives? And why are people clinging so tenaciously to traditional religious beliefs in an age of science and technology?

It's easy to attack specific religious beliefs. Easy to expose the absurdities and the inconsistencies of the things people believe. But what do these rational arguments mean to a family, to a mother and a father who are raising their kids in a religious environment where parenting is grounded not just in their own arbitrary decisions, but in the larger framework of God's love and God's purpose for their lives. You and I may disagree with many of the things these people believe, but when you see how their beliefs shape their lives and relationships, you have to respect the power and the validity of faith itself.

We love to point out all the benefits science has brought us. Better health. Longer lives. Work that's physically less demanding and less tedious. A wonderful abundance of consumer goods. Greater access to information of all sorts. A new understanding of the nature and history of the universe.

But we must not forget that these improvements in our lives have come at a price. Thanks to science, a small earth-centered world created by a loving and purposeful God has been replaced by a vast impersonal universe, an incomprehensible cosmic happening. Carl Sagan loved to rub it in: "We live on a tiny hunk of rock," he said, "circling a star... which is just one star in a galaxy that contains 400 billion stars ... and in a universe that contains 100 billion galaxies." It's ridiculous, he said, to assume that this vast, mind-boggling universe was created just to provide a home for us or to assume our lives have a central place in it.

Science writers seem to enjoy the goose-flesh excitement of peering out into this universe. But I'm afraid a lot of people don't share their pleasure. A universe of 100 billion swirling galaxies of stars is an intimidating and hostile place, and in huge numbers, people are refusing to live there. The debate over creation and evolution is not just a conflict between science and the Bible, it's a struggle between two different ways of living in the world.

Believers refer to themselves as people of faith, but I think that faith is driven by a powerful desire to escape the frightening and depressing conclusions of science. It is more than they can handle. If we want them to grow, I think some genuine respect and sympathy is in order.

In fact, I suspect religious faith is a relatively modern development. I think it was born when scientific discoveries began to challenge a religious understanding of the universe. For most of world's history the conflict between science and religion did not exist. There was only one way of looking at the world and everybody shared it. It didn't take faith to believe in God... and heaven and hell... and angels and demons... when they were simply part of the world everybody believed in. Ironically, faith emerged as a way of hanging on to a world that science was in the process of demolishing.

I have feelings about this because I've been through it. I've moved the furniture of my life out of the cozy religious world I grew up in into the much larger universe science has been revealing. It's been a dramatic, sometimes traumatic experience. At times, it's felt as if I'd been evicted from paradise. At other times, it's felt as if God had been evicted. It's been the identity crisis of my life.

It took a while, but I must say, I've gotten to like it here in this bigger and more mysterious world. I'm freer to live, love, and be myself now. I'm my own person. And now with God out of the picture, I no longer have to justify the world to myself or to anybody else. I don't have to explain why God allows earthquakes and tsunamis and wars and holocausts to happen. I don't have to make theological sense of things that don't make any sense at all. I don't have to put my hands over my eyes to avoid glimpses of the real world that threaten my belief system, and then call that faith. Frankly, it's a relief.

But the best thing about moving out of that cozy religious world is the possibility of achieving a new, more dynamic faith. A faith that isn't hanging on desperately to beliefs and teachings that are out of step with science and a modern understanding of life. A faith that lives fully and energetically in the here and now. A faith committed to a better future.

I think it's unfortunate how traditional faith has painted itself into a pre-scientific religious corner. It's unfortunate how faith has become the opposite of faith. A word for defensiveness and fear. A word for not confronting the revelations of modern science. A word for not grappling with life in a reasonable and open-minded way.

I want faith. I need faith. I'm trying to live a moral and purposeful life. I'm trying to meet the everyday challenges of life without being pulled down by them. I'm trying to help others carry on, too. I'm trying to make my life count for something in the community and the world around me. I can't make sense of a lot of things traditional religions teach, but have a strong desire for a religious conviction, a religious approach to life, and the support of a religious community to keep me going.

I'm not interested in jamming scientific views down the throats of believers. I'm interested in liberating faith from its religious bondage, and taking it to a new level. My problem with so-called people of faith is not the fact that they have too much faith, but that they have too little. They strike me as insecure, defensive, and backward looking. The faith I want isn't afraid of doubt and it isn't afraid of knowledge. It incorporates both of them. It draws on all I believe and all I don't believe, and it unites and coordinates all these doubts and all these beliefs around a core purpose, a vision of a better world, and a belief that my life can matter.

Fritz Williams is the leader of the Baltimore Ethical Society.