You may be convinced that we’re becoming a
theocracy, pointing to religion’s steady intrusion into public policies in the
fields of science, public health, and foreign aid, just to name a few. Add to
that the stigma many atheists claim to face, and it’s clear that America is on
the verge of dumping the Constitution and making the Bible its governing
document.
Or maybe you’re certain that we’ve abandoned the
spiritual values and moral principles that made this nation great. Just look at
the high numbers of children born out of wedlock, the attacks on religious
liberty, and the attempts to erase God from the public sphere. Check out the
hostility toward religion from elites in journalism, universities, and the
media, and it’s obvious that people of faith are being victimized for their
beliefs.
If you resist choosing a side in this debate,
however, you’re not alone. Such simplistic extremes don’t begin to reflect the
way actual people live in the real world. Sure, these views make for lively
theatrics, but they ignore the dynamic complexities of behavior and belief.
In the real world people don’t fit into such tidy
boxes. Morality can be in the eye of the beholder. Good and evil are rarely
simple. And faith and doubt are most often intertwined.
In the interest of acknowledging these realities,
here are some instances of people who live—as most of us do—in the malleable
and mysterious middle: a believer who harbors doubt; a nonbeliever who harbors
faith; and a believer turned nonbeliever turned back to believer, who embodies
all of the above.
Let’s start with a devout woman who goes to a
charismatic evangelical church. If ever there were a person who should hold a
firm unwavering belief in God, it would be someone such as this, right? Not
necessarily.
Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann spent years studying
this charismatic church for her book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the
American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann found that some church
members, despite the church’s conservative theology, wavered about a number of
core religious beliefs, including the issue of God’s existence. The devout
woman evidently belonged in this group because at a prayer meeting one night,
she blurted out, “I don’t believe it, but I’m sticking to it. That’s my
definition of faith.”
Luhrmann calls the woman’s outburst a “modern day
version of Pascal’s wager.” Similar to the 17th century French philosopher, the
woman had evidently decided that, given the impossibility of proving God’s
existence, it was smarter to live as if God were real rather than succumb to
doubt. In much the same way as Pascal, she decided that “belief is a wise
wager.”
Next, let’s look at a nonbeliever—writer Mark
O’Connell, who in a recent essay for The New Yorker expresses unbound
admiration for the novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose books are infused with
religious sensibility and grace. O’Connell is somewhat surprised at his embrace
of Robinson, given his “borderline hostility” toward religion, which he
associates with self-hatred, boredom, terror, and suffering.
O’Connell finds himself captured not just by the
grace of Robinson’s prose but also by her moral intelligence. He writes:
[Robinson]
makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a
fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine
grace. … I’ll never share her way of seeing and thinking about the world and
our place in it, but her writing has shown me the value and beauty of these
perspectives. …
[Her
writing] feels like wisdom. Perhaps not the kind of wisdom I am used to
acknowledging, but wisdom all the same.
Finally, let’s hear from someone who grew up in a
conservative religious community, left the fold to be an inquiring intellectual
and artist, and then came back—poet Christian Wiman, who in his recent book, My
Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, helps narrow the gap between
religious and secular sensibilities by claiming both qualities within himself.
“To admit that there may be some psychological need
informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual
imperative,” Wiman writes in his book, “any more than acknowledging the
chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human
love.”
Two major jolts—falling in love and being diagnosed
with cancer—sent Wiman back to Christianity. “It took a radical disruption of
my life to allow me to see the sanity and vitality of this strange and ancient
thing,” he writes. Wiman acknowledges how strange a return to religion seems,
even to him. “Live long enough in secular culture and at some point religious
belief becomes preposterous to you,” he admits. “I know this was true for me.”
And yet the way he describes his faith, as spurred
by a search for meaning and a need to get beyond himself to inhabit a larger
reality, as well as a desire to understand those moments when everyday reality
spills into something beyond rational comprehension and human
understanding—well, you don’t have to be religious to understand that.
To point out the commonalities between the people in
these three examples is not to say that there are no significant differences
between religious and secular people or that that these differences do not
matter. Of course they do. But these days, when each side squares off and sees
its respective opponent as inherently suspicious and even evil, it is worth
acknowledging that we all hold beliefs of one sort or another, and that our
human longings, though they may go by different names, may not be so different
in the end.
About the author: Sally Steenland is Director of the
Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.
Steenland, a best-selling author, former newspaper columnist, and teacher,
explores the role of religion and values in the public sphere.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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