Part 3: Faith and the Spectacle of Reality
This is Part 3 of a series where I explore aspects of the story of the Christian faith from my perspective. My interest is simply to look at this aspect of my own life in a manner that others who know me in a different context may understand. And in so doing, I come to better understand my own faith journey.
Because of its length, it will appear in two posts.
Embracing Faith for Reality
An impetus for this series is a concern about how we understand reality in our day. I have had people tell me that they do not believe reality can be known. They see reality as a perception that is treated as a social construct. The problem with this perspective is that the logical endpoint is nihilistic narcissism. Beginning with the Cartesian notion of cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am, reality can only be known from a personalist point-of-view. Meaning that each individual person becomes the ultimate judge of their own truth. Essentially, everything that can be known can only be known for its value and utility to me. Nothing and no one can be known or appreciated for who they are or what it is in and of themselves. We live in an age of utility, and transactional exchange explains how we relate to reality. As a result, power, whether financial, political, or institutional, becomes the highest form of utility. Is it any wonder that our world is filled with conflict and war?
Faith in the ancient world carried two different connotations.
One conception treated faith as an understanding of who I believe in and why.
The other is faith is what I do in being faithful, trustworthy, and worthy of confidence.
Our modern sense of faith is more like a product or item. It has utilitarian value for some exchange or goal that I have. A business contract is a statement of trust that the parties will faithfully fulfill the agreement. It is a contract required to receive something in exchange.
People believe in God or Jesus in order to receive salvation. Hundreds of thousands of preachers will say this on Sunday morning, unaware that they are selling an economic exchange between the individual and the divine. God or Jesus are not valued in and of themselves, but rather as the agents of salvation. This is the transactional model of religion. This is why forensic psychopathology dominates how the church approaches people. The appeal is to the inherent selfishness of the individual.
I’m making this claim fully awaren that the vast majority of preachers and theologians will disagree with me. Based on my expereince, this theological perspecive is an accommodation to Enlightenment rationalist thought. It is not that it is wrong, which it isn’t. Rather it is a reductivist perspective on the nature of God. It is a particular perspecive that does not represent the comprehensive whole of the Christian Gospel.
Every human being places their faith in something. It is a form of trust or dependence. It may be in God, a person, an institution, or an ideology. We also hear the term used in the form of having faith in oneself.
Faith provides meaning and identity for the world within our immediate grasp and beyond. As a result, faith carries with it both sacred and secular meanings.
Faith is how we access the world and the world beyond. We believe that there is something beyond rather than nothing. We trust that what transcends our awareness has substance enough to orient our lives. In effect, we believe because we need to believe to fill a hole or meet a need that has been revealed to us in the context of reality. Faith, then, is the utility that is needed to help our lives.
Faith is a way we measure our lives. Are we faithful or faithless? Are we faithful to the people we believe in, like our spouse, family, or team? Are we faithful in what we do? Are we faithful in meeting our obligations and responsibilities to my company or community? These questions define our lives as having meaning beyond some minimalistic, utilitarian purpose.
Faith, for some people, is a test or a bet. We’ve heard of people who bargain with God. In war, foxhole conversations are bargains with God. “If you save me from this battle, I’ll start going to church.” This isn’t genuine faith. It is a bribe, another transactional approach to an authority figure to get something that I want. Now, I know that there are many of these moments of crisis where a declaration of faith is true and life-transforming. Are they the exceptions or the norm? There is no way any of us can know. This is the nature of the broad comprehensive nature of reality. From this perspective, reality is a spiritual reality. It is where we interface with God in the moment of crisis.
Faith is an obligation or responsibility. I must believe. I must go to church. I must be a good person. Or God will reject me. Faith, in this sense, is a burden, a weight, possibly the recognition that reality is pressing in on us in a way that requires us to pay attention.
Faith ultimately is a combination of two realities.
One is the reality of this world. It is a world of hardship, pain, and consequence.
The other reality is the world beyond our understanding.
This is the world of the spiritual. The context for all our relationships.
It is where hope can be found as the focus of faith.
The Transition in the Meaning of Faith
As modern people, we view the world through a lens that places the individual at the center of society. During the early modern period, the focus was on industrial production. People were the means of production. They did the work, and the owners benefited. This clip from the beginning of John Ford’s great film of a Welsh mining community, How Green Was My Valley, shows the relationship between the world of production, the society of working families, and the place of faith in the context of that world. As the men return home from the mine, they sing the old Welsh hymn, Guide Me O’ Thou Great Jehovah, celebrating the Bread of Heaven of the coins dropped into their mother’s apron to feed their family.
Faith for these people is the bond of the family and dependence upon God’s grace and provision for survival through a life of hardship. God was an all-encompassing presence in their lives as faith focused them on the benefits of the next world, not this one.
In the post-World War II world, the content of religious faith began to shift. I grew up in the older traditional church environment where family and faith were the focus of belief. It was more like the family in How Green Was My Valley. Just as consumer product companies began to appeal to consumers to buy their products as a representation of their social advancement, churches emerged with a similar message.
Faith in God in many churches shifted to the benefits to come to people in this world. As incomes rose, the modern middle class emerged. As wealth and opportunities for social and professional advancement beyond that of previous generations, status grew in importance. The result was a world of increasing emphasis on individual success. With this change, came the emergence of the Prosperity Gospel, believing God wanted everyone to be rich and successful. Its conflicted message was that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and poverty a sign of a lack of faith.
Emphasis shifted away from the collective of the congregation as an intergenerational faith community of families, toward the church as an outlet for networking for business and social advancement. Religion became, for the individual believer, another form of consumption. It doesn’t mean that a person in this context does not have genuine faith. Rather, this consumer culture inhibits the spiritual growth of people.
New forms of being the church grew as a popular way for churches to attract members. If we think of faith as how an individual orient him or herself in the world, these new expressions of being a church became another place to find messages about self-development, like that of psychologists, life coaches, spiritual gurus, and media personalities. Self-development became synonymous with spiritual development. As a result, churches had to appeal to the self-interest of people to attract them into the church. Their self-interest cut across the conservative to liberal spectrum, where both personal development and justice activism were representations of this consumer version of Christianity.
This transformation in American culture took place as people began to see that they were no longer subject to a culture of production, but were now the objects of a sophisticated form of consumer marketing. Every person became classified as a particular type of consumer. I learned this through the marketing of my first book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change.
Traditional book marketing focused on specific roles in business or society. I tend to ignore those labels because they do not explain the complexity that is found in a person. Instead, I wrote the book for people who saw themselves in transition. During the year after publication, as a traveled the US doing book events, the universal character of the book was proven to me as people at every event told me their stories of life or career transition. In every situation, the question of purpose, which is analogous to faith, was central to their transitions.
Who we are in a consumer culture is how we serve in that culture. In this sense, society or the culture that is closest to us defines who we are. If we believe this to be true, then we come to believe that we are deserving of all the good things that life can provide. The idea of original sin, which had long served as a way to understand the complexity of human nature, was cast aside as it was seen by marketers as a negative message of shaming people. Instead of joining a church to find salvation from sin, many churches attracted people by a message of God’s love for the individual. The seeming lack of ability to hold these two defining characteristics of human experience in tension - Original Sin and God Loves the Sinner - is a product of the consumerist nature of the modern church. Consumerism, commodified, monetized, personalized, and marginalized, affects the full experience of a person. The reality question of “Why do I feel so alien and without meaning, if God loves me so much?”, never gets adequately answered. The effect of the COVID pandemic has changed this for people as I have found an openness for conversation and discovery about what lies beyond what is already known about faith, God, the church, and the person.
The final section of Part 3 will appear shortly.