Thoughts on True Belief

I'm taking "The Response," the much-publicized prayer and fasting rally starring Texas Governor Rick Perry, with a grain of salt. I've grown up in American and Evangelical culture, and both strands are prone to hyperbole. The website reminds us that we are in a "historic" moment that demands a "historic" response and that this "historic" prayer rally will start a "historic" movement towards... what? Prosperity? A more Christian nation? More Christians in the nation? A revival of sorts? Did this "historic" rally go above and beyond all the other "historic" rallies? I've sat in various stadiums and hotel ball rooms to be told how America was on a crossroads so many times that it doesn't really stick anymore.

This is not to downplay the problems in the U.S. or anywhere else. Debt, division and war are serious and sobering things. Prayer and repentance are appropriate responses. But I fear (and I hope my fear is wrong) that much of the hyperbole is to blaze a path for a great man (to rephrase the website), so that Governor Perry or someone like him will be a new Evangelical David, casting stones at Philistines with different political opinions, a legion of praying voters behind him.

These thoughts on The Response were first provoked by Frank Bruni's recent NYTimes column entitled "True Believers, All of Us." After commenting on the media response to, well, The Response, he begins to critique faith in ideologies all together, left and right, religious and political, corporate and private. Aren't we all like those silly Evangelicals in Texas, holding on to our little beliefs and refusing to face reality when challenged? Why do people hold such beliefs? Of course! They want easy answers in tough times. Bruni writes:

"Clarity seduces. So does simplicity. We don’t want to hear that different skills produce different results in different contexts, but rather that there are “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” the number specific, finite. We like to believe that triathlon training will trump genes and keep all major illness and minor sagging at bay, and that the metabolic alchemy of a cabbage-soup diet or a no-carb diet or some other diet will work wonders and obviate humdrum moderation. Magical thinking, all of it."

As for America's troubles, Bruni has a response of his own.

"And right now, with the stock market floundering and our credit rating downgraded and millions of Americans stranded in unemployment and Washington frozen in confusion, the temptation to look for one summary prescriptive — for certainty, even miracles — is strong. We’d be wise to resist it. To get us out of this mess, we need a full range of extant remedies, a tireless search for new ones and the nimbleness and open-mindedness to evaluate progress dispassionately and adapt our strategy accordingly. Faith and prayer just won’t cut it. In fact, they’ll get in the way."

I share his skepticism of clarity and simplicity, five points to happiness, diets that claim you won't feel hungry or pre-canned political solutions. But like it or not, some form of ideology will always drive politics. If Bruni wishes to separate politicians from the ideologies of those who elected them, then he doesn't have a prayer.

More to the point, his criticism of ideology is guilty of the same simplicity admonishes us to avoid. Ideas often come from people with worldviews, and we have a lot of those. If he wants to see a "full extant of remedies" for our economic woes, then he can peruse the websites of various think tanks, newspapers and faculty papers. Few solutions would be faith-free, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed no bias. They come from people with different views about government, commerce, responsibility, economy and morality. Most of them are be well-reasoned, logical and accompanied by graphs. All the data, of course, must be interpreted, and here is where humans cease to be computers. We start debating how many angels can dance on the head of a deficit. After all, we don't have labs to test every economic idea in academia and advocacy (and, for good reason, we don't give our government the dictatorial power to do such things). We have data, ideas and history, all of which are opened to interpretation based on what we believe. True believers, all of us.

Rather than encouraging the impossible task of jettisoning belief for the ideal of rational social science, let's encourage our politicians to take Bruni's Times colleague Ross Douthat's advice. No American political party has the majority or the capital for a sweeping ideological victory, Douthat argues. They should not give up on their beliefs nor cease to hope about the future, but while America (and those who represent us) remains divided, they need to remember their responsibility to govern effectively.

Bruni is correct that we long for simple solutions and quick clarity. It sells well, and people in business, politics and religion have all taken advantage of it. But true belief is grittier. Among the reasons I remain a Christian is that Christianity refuses to be the bag of goods some folks sell it as (see the prosperity gospel, for a worrying example of this). Christianity never promises ease, health or worldly political conquest. The Biblical picture of Christianity is one of relationship: often parent to child, husband to wife, even friendship. The best of these relationships, from whatever perspective you experience them, are not a series of simple solutions easily replicated on PowerPoint. But they make life deeper, richer and more hopeful. When these relationships are perverted, we taste hell. Christian faith is a difficult, refining, fiery, trying, dynamic, wonderful, loving relationship with God through Jesus Christ, reconciled by His blood and sealed with His Spirit. It's complexer than the finest of wines, and it's worth drinking deep.

This leads us to prayer. Prayer is not a vending machine button to a better life or a better America. It's a the communication essential for the relationship to function. (For further reading on prayer, I highly recommend A Praying Life by Paul Miller, which I wrote about here). A life of genuine faith and prayer does not "get in the way." More often, it allows us to see clearly and humbly face our problems.

This leads me back to The Response. Again, I'm underwhelmed by hyperbola and weary of any political use of Christianity. But if 30,000 of my brother and sisters genuinely practiced repentance and prayed for their country, then a good thing happened underneath it all. If The Response enriched their relationship with God and sent them back into their communities in humble faith and prayer, then may they be examples and proclaimers of true belief.