Faith, Belief and Commitment    Address by Ann Coxworth    Sunday 6 January 2008

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Faith, Belief and Commitment

A few weeks ago, during the response period in a service about the roots of North American Unitarianism, Ivan raised the issue of our use of the word “faith” in Unitarian circles. It’s one of those words borrowed from traditional religion – words like “church”, “worship”, “reverend” - that we have tended to try to re-define to have meaning for us. I share Ivan’s discomfort with much of this re-definition, but at the same time I have often found myself wondering what to do about the gap that’s left when we cut these rather loaded words out of our vocabulary. This has prompted me to dig out a talk that I delivered two and a half years ago, at a time when we, as a congregation, had been going through a period of attempting to re-define ourselves by creating a new statement of mission.

          I had been browsing through the McNally Robinson bookstore newsletter and my attention was caught by the title of a book, “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris.  I hadn’t read the book, and I didn’t know anything about it or its author – but this is how the bookstore promotion started its comments:

          “The End of Faith - In the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, Harris argues that we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another.  Even moderate lip service to religion blinds us to the perils of fundamentalism.”

          Hmmm! While I find myself agreeing that the kind of faith that pits one true god against another is fraught with danger, I’m not sure whether that does indeed imply the need for the end of faith. When I was a kid in Britain, during the war, there used to be a very popular radio program on the BBC called The Brains Trust. The format was that a panel of very brainy and very articulate people would discuss philosophical, ethical, scientific, cultural questions sent in by listeners. My parents used to listen to The Brains Trust all the time, so I got exposed to it well before I could really appreciate the discussion. What I remember about it is one of the panelists, a Professor Joad.  Professor Joad was famous for starting each response to a philosophical or ethical question with the preamble, “Well, it all depends what you mean by…….”. So, the question “Does God exist?” would elicit the initial response, “Well, it all depends what you mean by God.”  I think if we were to ask Professor Joad, who is doubtless long dead by now, whether faith is still valid, or useful, or desirable, he would start off by saying, “Well, it all depends what you mean by faith”.

          So, in memory of Professor Joad, whoever he was and wherever he is now, I’d like to have us spend this morning thinking about what we mean by faith, and whether it is a word that can have relevance for us.  It’s a word people still use a lot, and it’s a strong, heavy-duty kind of word. It’s often loaded with feeling. But also, it’s sometimes used very mechanically. So where do we start?

          Well, one place that I’ve run up against the term “faith” is in my environmental work.  As environmental activists we often think about how to communicate with various influential sectors of the community, sectors whose concerns may overlap with ours. The same, I’m sure, is true of peace activists, or anti-poverty activists, or of any group that has a message that it wants to communicate to the larger society. Rather than thinking about the larger society around us as being homogenous, we find it useful to  mentally divide society into sub-groups that are more homogeneous. As activists we talk, for example, about the labour movement as a sector within society as a whole.  We assume that people within that sector have certain common interests and concerns, and we have to think about how to most effectively communicate our message to people with those particular concerns and interests. What is the kind of language to which they will pay attention? Similarly we talk about the business community, the academic community, the Aboriginal community. These are ways of sub-dividing society as a whole into sub-groups who should perhaps be approached in different ways. And amongst those sub-groups, we recognize that there is an important sector of the community made up of people who are, in the broad sense of the word, religious -  people who are significantly influenced by their church, their synagogue, temple or mosque, by their scriptures, their group’s ethical concepts, or their spiritual leaders – and because several religious organizations have something to say about the sacredness of the earth, or about man’s relationship to nature – this seems like an important sector for environmentalists to communicate with. The generic, inclusive term that we use to refer to this sector is “the faith community”, which is supposed to embrace all kinds of groups that fit into that tax-exempt, religious organization status that we Unitarians enjoy. As Unitarians, we are often lumped in with traditionally religious organizations under this generic heading of “faith communities”. So I find myself wondering whether we really belong there, and if so, what that term might mean to us.
          We feel we sort of know what to say when we are asked what faith we belong to. Have you ever been asked, for example, on a hospital admission form, what your faith is?
When we’re asked that question, we tend to assume that the correct answer is “Unitarian” (or possibly humanist or Buddhist or atheist or something else that defines our specific take on Unitarianism). But what do we mean if we say Unitarianism is our faith?  Does it mean more than just a label to define where we spend Sunday morning?

          Here’s another way in which some use the word faith. Some Unitarians have taken to using the expression “in faith” as a way of signing letters. Instead of “yours sincerely”, we sometimes see “in faith”. I’ve often meant to ask people who use this expression just what it is they are trying to communicate through these two little words.
  
          Then there’s the expression “Keeping the faith”. Keeping the faith implies loyalty; “Being faithful” implies sticking exclusively with your mate, or, if you are a dog, sticking with your master, whatever the circumstances.  Interestingly, Faithfulness, or loyalty is generally perceived as a virtue, regardless of the object of faith.  Do we see it that way?
 
          For traditional Christians, faith seems to mean much the same as belief. I took a look at Billy Graham’s website – there’s a question and answer section there where Graham’s staff respond to queries from the public: For example:

Question: Aren’t there many good religious writings and religions that can show us the way to know god and experience eternal life?

Answer: Mr. Graham believes there is only one infallible standard – the Bible, God’s word.  In it God has revealed all we need to know and all we can know about Himself.  A true faith is based on the word of God, while a faith that is based only on the ideas of men is not reliable……We believe that Jesus Christ alone gave us the full truth about God.   Was Jesus whom he claimed to be? Yes! How do we know? Because he rose again from the dead.  This act forever sets Jesus apart from all the religious leaders of the world.  And it also means that He alone can forgive us and save us.

          This is a statement of faith, and an example of the Fundamentalist Christian belief that sinners can be saved from damnation only by faith in God’s grace. A faith, or a belief, that forgiveness has been purchased by the death of Jesus. What you believe determines whether or not you are one of the saved. “Those who believe in me shall have everlasting life”, Jesus is reputed to have said. This means that an ability to believe, in the absence of physical evidence, is the requirement for salvation. There is no place for doubt. So if belief really were so darned important, we’d need to be very clear about just what it is that we believe.

          Some years ago, we had a service here in which several of us were asked to speak briefly about, “What I believe”. I was one of the people on this panel.  And in preparing for it, I came to realize that there is hardly anything that I believe absolutely, other than abstract mathematical truths. I do not have absolute faith that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, although I will be extremely surprised if it doesn’t. I regularly gamble my life on the probability that the force of gravity works the same way at all times, everywhere, but yet I can entertain the possibility that this may sometime, somewhere, be shown to be invalid. The sliver of doubt is always there – not necessarily causing any discomfort. On more metaphysical questions such as “Is there life after death?” I can do no more than speculate in the absence of scientific evidence. I find it extremely interesting to speculate about such questions, but I am not even looking for absolute answers. So I am not a believer. I don’t think there is anything which I believe so strongly that I would refuse to consider contrary evidence or ideas. But as a non-believer, does that automatically mean that I don’t have a faith?

          The thing that got me started thinking about this again was the publication of a book by Michael Ruse called “The Evolution-Creation Struggle”.  Ruse is a confirmed evolutionist, very involved in the American argument about the teaching of creationism in schools. His book is not so much designed to convince the world of the correctness of the theory of evolution and the errors of creationism, but rather to expose the dangers of taking “faith positions” on such an issue. His book has provoked a number of very interesting reviews that investigate this whole confusion between belief and faith. For example, Richard Dawkins, in his review, describes faith as one of the world’s great evils, “comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”.  He defines faith as “belief that isn’t based on evidence”, as distinct from science that is based on verifiable facts.

          But another reviewer, Karen Armstrong, an ex-Roman Catholic nun, says that the popular conviction that science and faith are diametrically opposed is based on an erroneous assumption, that is, the assumption that faith is synonymous with belief, and that to be religious, people must accept certain belief positions. On the contrary, she says, in most of the great religions theology is regarded at best as a kind of poetry about matters that must, by their very nature, elude definition.  The Koran, she says, regards theological speculation as self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other.  Every single verse, every story told in the Koran, she says, is a parable, because it is only possible to talk about the indescribable god in terms of signs and symbols. We’re not intended to interpret these stories literally. Hence, she says, Darwin and his evolutionary theory have raised scarcely a ripple of concern in the Muslim world.

          Moreover, she claims, the creation myths in the Judeo-Christian bible were never intended as definitive dogma either. She thinks they were written to serve a social purpose at the time. The Genesis story imagines Yahweh, the God of the old testament, summoning all things into being with a mere word of command.  At the time this creation story is believed to have been written, in the 6th century BC, most other Middle Eastern cosmologies were extremely violent.  Genesis Chapter I was revolutionary in its time in omitting all violence from the act of creation. This calm creation story was intended, says Karen Armstrong, as a healing vision, designed, she claims, to console the traumatized deportees for whom it was written. Cosmologies, she says, were originally therapeutic in function. In the pre-modern world, it was generally understood that there were two ways of arriving at truth.  Plato called them mythos and logos. Logos (what we call reason or science) was exact, practical and testable.  To be effective it had to correspond to external reality. Myth, on the other hand, expressed the more puzzling, elusive aspects of human experience.  It has often been called a form of psychology, a tool which helped people negotiate their inner world.  If you became a refugee, or witnessed a terrible natural catastrophe, you did not simply want a logical explanation; you also wanted myth to show you how to manage your grief. With the advent of our scientific modernity, however, logos, the scientific approach, has achieved such spectacular results that myth has become discredited, and now, in common speech, myth is something that didn’t happen, an untrue story.  The problem comes when some religious people, such as the Christian fundamentalists, began to read religious myths as though they were logos. So belief in the literal truth of the myth has, for them, become the basis of a faith. Armstrong suggests that it’s very important to distinguish between belief and faith.

          So if faith is not the same as belief, what else can it be?  An interesting insight for me came in an article in New Scientist about suicide bombers, specifically suicide bombers who had grown up in Britain. The writer, Michael Bond, was thinking about the fact that studies of the personalities of suicide bombers has shown that they are generally not what we would regard as crazy people.  They are apparently better off than average for their community, and better educated.  They are also rarely suicidal in the pathological sense. Few have symptoms of mental illness or drug abuse. They don’t even have to be religious extremists. So, Michael Bond wondered, how can comfortably-off, well-educated young men, born and brought up in Britain, be turned into people who end up sacrificing themselves and killing civilians for a cause that seems a long way from their daily life? The answer, he says, is, it happens much more easily than you might imagine. Suicide attacks in modern times are all conceived and organized by militant groups, and they all use the same methods.  First, they find people, usually young and male, who are sympathetic to the group’s cause, and they organize them into small units. Secondly they exploit their motivation to fight for the cause, using religious or political indoctrination, emphasizing the nobility of self-sacrifice.  Thirdly, and this is the key point, they have all the members of the unit make a pact declaring their commitment to what they are about to do, their commitment to die and to kill the innocent.  Beyond this point of mutual commitment, it’s psychologically very hard for them to back out. The sense of commitment to a small group of peers can turn just about anybody into a potential suicide bomber; the crucial factor is not the psychology of the individual but that of the group. Faith, life-changing faith, here is based on loyalty and commitment to the group, rather than to an ideology.

          So perhaps faith can more accurately be defined as “that to which I give my heart”.  Faith may not really be a matter of what I believe, what version of the origin of the universe I prefer to work with, or whether I find it more helpful to think of Jesus as born of a virgin or as having a biological father. Or even, whether I find the concept of salvation through the cross as a useful way of governing my behaviour.  What you may or may not believe about such concepts may have no relevance for your real faith, in the sense of what you give your heart to.  Personally, I think that one of the things that I have given my heart to is the ideal of protecting the earth from further degradation. I live with hope that it is possible to change human society into ways of living and interacting that are more earth-friendly. I am committed to trying to live on the basis of such hope. Perhaps hope and commitment together make up faith. Most importantly, I experience a personal commitment to a group of people who share that ideal, and to some extent my behaviour is shaped by a sense of loyalty to that group. My faith, if you will, is defined and strengthened by the group.  But it’s not a faith that is dependant on a specific belief. Rather it’s a bond that comes from a shared hope and shared commitment. For me as an individual, I could interpret this as my faith.
 
          But what about us as Unitarians, as a group that is regarded as a “faith community”? I think one of our challenges as a congregation or as a movement is that we have difficulty defining a common hope, a common commitment, a common faith, using the word faith in the sense of “what we give our hearts to”. As individuals, I think most of us could be described as people of commitment – we each have values to which we are committed, we have groups to whom we are very loyal. Our mission statement process three years ago was an attempt to get at this question as a whole congregation. What is it that we collectively give our hearts to? In that process of developing our mission statement we came to a fairly strong consensus that we are committed to dialogue across differences. Our mission statement says “We are a community, founded on freedom of religious thought and exploration , which strives to speak with honesty, listen with respect, reason with compassion, and live our principles.”  And let’s also read those principles, which we say we strive to live by:

“We affirm and promote our principles:
- The inherent worth and dignity of every person
- Justice, equity and compassion in human relations
- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregation
- A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
- The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our Congregation and in society at large
- The goal of community with peace, liberty and justice for all, and
- Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”

          This is a pretty important commitment in a world that is torn apart by ideologies, by differing priorities, cultural expectations, values and aspirations. Is this common commitment our faith? And is it enough to allow us to call ourselves a faith community?

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