In this post I want to reflect briefly upon the nature of belief. I want to show that it is important to distance the idea of belief from an affirmation concerning the world that can be defended empirically. Indeed it is the idea that belief can be defended empirically that I argue actually eclipses the nature of belief itself. Instead belief must be understood as an affirmation concerning the nature of things that interacts with, but is not restricted to, facts. In short, beliefs are not placed into danger by being exposed as counter-factual.

Take the idea of universal human rights discourse. One does not argue that all people are equal by engaging in empirical research to compare such things as intelligence, awareness etc. between races or sexes. People would be rightly bemused by the researcher who heard we were all equal and then attempted to construct some quantitative research to prove it. The moment we place the belief into the realm of quantitative research the belief is fundamentally undermined. For example, as soon as someone argues that torture is wrong because it does not work, because it is not effective in the obtaining of reliable information, they have given too much ground to the advocate of torture and lost, even if they win. As Zizek points out, the truly disturbing thing about the Bush Administration admitting that they tortured people was not that it was a revelation (we already knew that they were doing it, we had evidence of rendition flights refueling in the UK etc.). Rather the horrific element of the disclosure was the way that they were making the unspeakable speakable. By opening up a debate about torture they took the US into very troubling water. As Zizek says, we all agree that rape is wrong, but we do not rationally defend this position around coffee tables. It would be a moral disaster if rape was to become acceptable for our society to discuss and something we critiqued on rational grounds.

To return then to the belief in universal human rights, it is an affirmation that may at times seem to sit well with empirical research and, at other times, sit badly with it. It is a belief insomuch as we live by it, are inspired by it and fight for it, all the while being able to acknowledge its lack of epistemic justification. In this way it is a tool for reforming the world rather than merely describing it. For instance, it may be true that a certain segment of society commits more crime than another. However, the belief that no specific group of people are more prone to crime, when acted upon, helps to reform the world in such a way that it begins to resemble what we affirm.

Here our belief about how things already are does not necessarily refer to the way the world exists in its present form, but can help us to build the world in such a way that it corresponds to the belief. Such claims turn out to have an eschatological dimension. What we claim to be the case ‘now’ is ‘not yet’. It is a claim that may have no factual legitimacy in the present, but which can create the factual legitimacy when one conforms ones actions to it.

In the battle between Christian fundamentalism and science what we are losing is the category of belief itself. For the Christian fundamentalist wishes to understand his or her theological claims in scientific terms. Here the Christian fundamentalist eclipses belief in the very claim that they can offer it an epistemic foundation. Yet, if we take a traditional Christian idea concerning say, the divinity of Christ, the point is not to attempt to ground this claim in some kind of empirical evidence, as if there were some divine spark in Christ’s eye that we could point to as proof of the claim. It is a belief insofar as it is not problematised by its absurdity (that a flesh and blood fragile being is the incarnation of the source of all). This is not to say that faith claims are always absurd, for there may be times when they appear to make more sense of the world, the point is merely that their experience as counter-factual is not a problem within the tradition.

A belief is thus an affirmation that can be fully asserted by a person at the same time as that person admits its absurdity and acknowledges their own doubt as to its veracity. Indeed this is often when belief is at its must luminous. Take the example of activists who protest against the building of a motorway through a forest. It is perfectly possible to find many, if not most, of the protesters acknowledging both the futility of their mission and even questioning its justification. The protesters may know that, on purely rational grounds, the motorway is needed. They may know that, were they to engage in a public debate, their position would be exposed as lacking the rational framework that would justify their actions. Why? Because, the hegemonic ideological matrix that we exist within dictates the scope and limitations of the rational framework itself. So why do they act? Because the activists are affirming now a reality that does not yet exist, a reality that would, if it was instantiated, justify the actions that they are presently engaged in. They are fighting without justification for a world that would offer that justification.

Here is an interesting clip from an interview with John Dominic Crossan discussing the difference between literalism and fundamentalism. Found on Shuck and Jive.

The title for this post comes from the title of one of the talks I have been giving on the ‘Lessons’ tour. The main gist of the argument lies in exploring how the fundamentalism we witness at work today is, at its core, a movement that conserves and preserves the status quo. Its violence at the subjective level (e.g. defending the evils of misogyny, homophobia, unjust conflicts and self-interested foreign policy) is the direct outworking of its ultimate impotence when it comes to instigating real change.

Take the example of so many wars today. Amidst all their violence they are more often than not fought in order to preserve the way things are, to protect people in power, or to accumulate more resources. Thus their horrific violence at the subjective level hides the fact that they preserve the deeper objective violence of the system itself. The bloodshed thus helps to maintain the injustice that currently exists, ensuring that structures of oppression remain unchallenged.

In the same way fundamentalism, while violent at a surface level (at the level of everyday life) is simply a mask that hides the fact that it does not rock the very foundations of worldly power. Its frantic posturing and aggression is ultimately in the service of those with power, money, and voice. In this way their various highly funded projects designed to change society actually ensure that nothing of any significance really changes (those who are oppressed continue to be oppressed, the rich continue to get richer, the poor continue to get poorer).

Let us not then attack such a position for being too violent (apart from anything else, this is what such a movement thrives on; seeing itself as the church militant), rather we must pull back the curtain and show the impotent wizard for who it really is.

In contrast to fundamentalism it is people like Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King who, in their pacifism, are truly violent (who are the true church militant). In their non-participation and uncompromising actions they lived out an alternative vision of how the world could work, directly challenging the foundations of worldy power. In their seductive vision of an alternative world and their unrelenting quest to pursue it they ruptured the systems of power that surrounded them and thus expressed the true violence of Christianity. A violence that shifts the underground by allowing the outsider to be heard.

Thus, the next time we hear of some blustering speaker attempt to bolster their support by making themselves sound like the follower of a cage-fighting, bodybuilding Jesus, we should avoid the trap of arguing that their image of Jesus is too violent and instead show how it isn’t nearly violent enough. Drawing out how, amidst all their seeming machismo they are little more than a timid sheep in wolves clothing.

So there seems to be energy around Bonhoeffer still (even if it is just to say that we should move on from Bonhoeffer). Instead of continuing the ever-growing comment section of the last post I thought I would write some thoughts in a new post. This means that people don’t need to read 40 comments before writing something. Before I make my main point I will however say that I am surprised at myself for returning to Bonhoeffer, for if you asked me a few weeks ago what I thought of his later writings I would have likely said that I thought they were mere fragments of thought done to death in the 60’s and that other thinkers have done the work that Bonhoeffer signaled and hinted at (thus rendering the letters of interest only for their historical value). And while part of me still thinks that might be true another part of me thinks of him in the same way that I think about Feuerbach, i.e. as an important transitional thinker. In particular Bonhoeffer opened up a way of thinking (or at least expressed it) that was not exhausted in the Radical Theology of the 60’s but which is a prophetic utterance concerning a much more virulent strain of theology that is vibrant and historically significant (what I am about to say relates to the great comment by Ian below – BTW I think Moot is a wonderful example of a community exploring this stuff).

Interestingly, Bonhoeffer does not attack religion as such. However he reflects that in the 20th century (though he sees it beginning in the 17th century) religion has become possible for less and less people because it has been problematical. Not because it has changed but because human beings have entered into a different epoch (my words not his, he talks of “man come of age”). In this new historical situation a religious expression of Christianity places God at the edges of human life as the Deus ex machina. Why? Because religion, for Bonhoeffer, is the belief in a metaphysical absolute from which everything hangs (onto-theology), and as human knowledge increases the more things in our existence do not require this metaphysical explanation. Religion is now exposed as advocating a God of the gaps. In addition to this the God of religion is only for those who feel a need to ask the metaphysical question, “Why”, and in a ‘world come of age”, this question is asked by fewer and fewer (a Nietzschian point par exellence). Indeed Bonhoeffer attacks with great passion those believers who would use the idea of death and illness to get people back to that metaphysical question (and even implicates existentialism and psychoanalysis in the same insidious project – which I would, of course, take issue with).

Bonhoeffer’s great insight in LPP as far as I can see, was to dimly perceive that, while religion was a predominant guise for Christianity throughout history this did not need to be the case – that Christianity could affirm all its central tenants without religion as he defined it (God could be affirmed without metaphysics – again he was not saying that this was ontologically better but rather was becoming historically nessesary). He saw religion as having served its time well, but which had finally reached its twilight.

This is interesting to me because I think it allows us to understand Fundamentalism in a different way. Namely, as an impotent reaction to the loss of religion. The attempt to place it back in the centre. Fundamentalism can thus be seen as the very evidence of the growing redundancy of religion. It is the violent kickback against the continual loss of ground that religion has had to concede in recent years. But for Bonhoeffer there is a way beyond an anemic religious Christianity that places God at the edge and a violent fundamentalism which impotently seeks to place religion in the centre and this is what he was hinting at. It has been left to others to explore what this alternative is (but for Bonhoeffer it was deeply Christocentric and exhibited itself in an unwavering concern for the world – just to relate to the important question that Lori asked).