I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about why people lose their faith.
Occasionally, it is due to concrete issues such as human failures, hard teachings, intellectual problems or troubling history.
Other times, it’s the outgrowth of poor choices.
And sometimes — as was the case for me at a young age — it’s the result of tragedies like the death of loved ones.
Revealed religion has always been messy. It’s the nature of the beast. As soon as we finite creatures attempt to relate to the infinite (and vice versa), the gap between the two often becomes blindingly and sometimes painfully obvious.
Human beings, in all their diverse imperfections, are bound to pursue the ideal with epic failures along the way. They will also inevitably misunderstand the workings of the divine at one point or another. That is simply an inescapable feature of the entire religious enterprise.
Nourish the roots
Many who struggle with religious faith typically find themselves wrestling with this demonstrable gap between the human and divine. And understandably so. It certainly raises a number of serious questions.
These questions matter, of course. But there is a distinction worth making. Some questions concern the branches of faith; others concern its roots.
“If you want to nourish a tree, you don’t splash water on the branches,” taught President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, acting president of the Quourm of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “You water the roots. Similarly, if you want the branches of your testimony to grow and bear fruit, nourish the roots.”
The roots run deeper
For religious faith to truly take root in our minds and hearts, it has to speak to our deepest questions about life, death and meaning. It has to grab us existentially. That suggests that our way forward may not be found among the branches.
More than that, this brings to the forefront an important possibility, often hidden to our view: Namely, that our view of the branches is in many cases actually shaped by our view of the roots.
What we believe about the fundamentals of faith informs the way that we make sense of everything else. Questions about God and religion are ultimately questions about who we are, why we are here and where we are going. They are the most existential questions we can have as human beings.
For me, wrestling with these existential questions has made concerns about human shortcomings, difficult history or confusing institutional policies pale by comparison. The concerns are real, but they feel less catastrophic when viewed alongside deeper questions of meaning, reality and existence.
Something rather than nothing
So how would one even begin to develop belief in the roots of revealed religion? As I lay out in my new book, “Nourishing the Roots,” a good place to start is with reality itself: Is it the kind of reality that makes more sense with or without God?
We could also take up the most basic of questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?
This question has become a little cliché in philosophical circles, but take a moment to think it through. Existence is so familiar to us that we forget just how strange it truly is.
Why should anything exist at all? What’s even stranger, though, is that existence is suspiciously intelligible. For instance, math works. And there’s no reason to assume that it should. The laws of nature make sense to us. There is a rationale and orderliness to them.
Should we really expect that from a meaningless cosmic accident?
Mystery of mind
Why are we able to grasp all of this with our minds in the first place? Have you ever wondered why we are able to experience thinking and feeling at all?
A rock rolling down a hill does not contain beliefs, intentions or meanings. And it is far from obvious how mindless particles suddenly produce mind or how subjectivity “emerges” from nonsubjective matter. Instead, to an increasing number of scholars, it seems more plausible that the purposive mind is a fundamental part of existence.
An enchanted world in plain sight
Across cultures and centuries, people have also claimed various encounters with God, including revelations, miracles and even exorcisms. Even today, we have an incredible number of reports from all over the world.
We’re not talking about a handful of quacks here and there. We are talking about literally millions of people from all over the planet. The magnitude and global reach of these phenomena suggest that our world isn’t as disenchanted as one might think.
I’ve had experiences of my own that have made the divine more than an intellectual proposition to me. In times of tragedy, I’ve been given a kind of spiritual clarity that offered both insight and comfort. In low moments of my own making, I became acutely aware that God was aware of me. I’ve also felt and seen providential nudges at certain points in my life. These kinds of experiences can ground faith more deeply than all of the intellectual arguments combined.
Nourishing these fundamental questions — the religious roots — has a way of putting the branches in their proper place, and it allows us to approach all of the other peripheral, secondary questions with a better perspective.
What do you want most?
In a discussion with the theologian Sarah Coakley, an agnostic interviewer once expressed concerns over the possibility of self-deception in religious belief. Coakley responded, “What are the conditions under which you could conceive of being drawn to believe in a way that you weren’t duping yourself?”
When the interviewer failed to provide any kind of criteria, she cut through the fluff and asked the more fundamental, existential questions: “Where are true joys to be found? … What are you seeking?”
So I would ask: When it comes to religious belief, what are you seeking? Is it a resolution to some grievance? Is it relief from the restrictions of certain expectations? Or is it the actual meaning of your life and existence: Who you are, why you are here and where you are going?
Because these are different quests. And, if I might be so bold, one matters more than the others.