[Dialogue] When Not Seeing is Believing -- Andrew Sullivan

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

A profound thinker; one of my favorites.  A bit long but worth  it!
 
 
Monday,  Oct. 2, 2006
When  Not Seeing Is Believing
Andrew Sullivan on the  rise of fundamentalism and why embracing spiritual 
doubt is the key to defusing  the tension between East and West
By ANDREW  SULLIVAN  
Something about  the visit to the U.N. by Iranian President Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad refuses to leave  my mind. It wasn't his obvious intention to pursue 
nuclear technology and  weaponry. It wasn't his denial of the Holocaust or even his 
eager anticipation  of Armageddon. It was something else entirely. It was his 
smile. In every  interview, confronting every loaded question, his eyes seemed 
calm, his  expression at ease, his face at peace. He seemed utterly  serene. 
What is the  source of his extraordinary calm? Yes, he's in a relatively good 
place right  now, with his Hizballah proxies basking in a military draw with  
Israel. Yes, the U.S. is bogged down in a brutal war in  Iraq. But 
Ahmadinejad is still  unpopular at home, the Iranian economy is battered, and his major 
foes,  Israel and the  U.S., far outgun him--for  now. 
So let me submit  that he is smiling and serene not because he is crazy. He 
is smiling gently  because for him, the most perplexing and troubling questions 
we all face every  day have already been answered. He has placed his trust in 
the arms of God. Just  because it isn't the God that many of us believe in 
does not detract from the  sincerity or power of his faith. It is a faith that 
is real, all too  real--gripping billions across the Muslim world in a new wave 
of fervor and  fanaticism. All worries are past him, all anxiety, all stress. 
"Peoples, driven  by their divine nature, intrinsically seek good, virtue, 
perfection and beauty,"  Ahmadinejad said at the U.N. "Relying on our peoples, 
we can take giant steps  towards reform and pave the road for human perfection. 
Whether we like it or  not, justice, peace and virtue will sooner or later 
prevail in the world with  the will of Almighty God." 
Human perfection.  Whether we like it or not. Justice, peace and virtue. That 
concept of the  beneficent, omnipotent will of God and the need to always 
submit to it, whether  we like it or not, is not new. It has been present in 
varying degrees throughout  history in all three great monotheismsJudaism, 
Christianity and Islamfrom their  very origins. And with it has come the utter 
certainty of those who say they  have seen the face of God or have surrendered 
themselves to his power or have  achieved the complete spiritual repose promised by 
the Books of all three  faiths: the Torah, the Gospels, the Koran. That is 
where the smile comes  from. 
Complete calm  comes from complete certainty. In today's unnerving, 
globalizing, sometimes  terrifying world, such religious certainty is a balm more in 
demand than ever.  In the new millennium, Muslims are not alone in grasping the 
relief of  submission to authority. The new Pope, despite his criticism of 
extremist  religion and religious violence, represents a return to a more 
authoritarian  form of Catholicism. In the Catholic triad of how we know truth--an 
eternal  dialogue between papal authority, scriptural guidance and the 
experience of the  faithful--Benedict XVI has tilted the balance decisively back toward 
his own  unanswerable truth. 
What was  remarkable about his recent address on Islam is what most critics 
missed. The  bulk of his message was directed at the West, at its disavowal of 
religious  authority and its embrace of what Benedict called "the subjective 
'conscience.'"  For Benedict, if your conscience tells you something that 
differs from his  teaching, it is a false conscience, a sign not of personal 
integrity but of sin.  And so he has silenced conscientious dissent within the 
church and insisted on  absolutism in matters like abortion, end-of-life decisions, 
priestly celibacy,  the role of women, homosexuality and interfaith  
dialogue. 
In Protestant  Christianity, especially in the U.S., the loudest voices are 
the most  certain and uncompromising. Many megachurches, which preach absolute 
adherence  to inerrant Scripture, are thriving, while more moderate 
denominations are on  the decline. That sense of certainty has even entered democratic 
politics in the  U.S. We have, after all, a proudly  born-again President. And 
religious certainty surely cannot be disentangled from  George W. Bush's utter 
conviction that he has made no mistakes in  Iraq. "My faith frees me," the  
President once wrote. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not  
like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me 
 to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next." In every messy context, 
the  President seeks succor in a simple certainty--good vs. evil, terror vs.  
freedom--without sensing that wars are also won in the folds of uncertainty 
and  guile, of doubt and tactical adjustment that are alien to the 
fundamentalist  psyche. 
I remember in my  own faith journey that in those moments when I felt most 
lost in the world, I  moved toward the absolutist part of my faith and gripped 
it with the white  knuckles of fear. I brooked no dissent and patrolled my own 
soul for any hint of  doubt. I required a faith not of sandstone but of  
granite. 
Many Western  liberals and secular types look at the zealotry closing in on 
them and draw an  obvious conclusion: religion is the problem. As our global 
politics become more  enamored of religious certainty, the stakes have 
increased, they argue, and they  have a point. The evil terrorists of al-Qaeda invoke 
God as the sanction for  their mass murder. And many beleaguered Americans 
respond by invoking God's  certainty. And the cycle intensifies into something 
close to a religious war.  When the Presidents of the U.S. and Iran speak as much 
about God as about  diplomacy, we have entered a newly dangerous era. The 
Islamist resurgence  portends the worst. Imagine the fanaticism of 16th century 
Christians, waging  religious war and burning heretics at the stake. Now give 
them nukes. See the  problem? Domestically, the resurgence of religious 
certainty has deepened our  cultural divisions. And so our political discourse gets 
more polarized, and our  global discourse gets close to impossible. 
How, after all,  can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like 
Ahmadinejad, who believes  that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to 
accelerate it? How can  Israel negotiate with people  who are certain their 
instructions come from heaven and so decree that  Israel must not exist in Muslim  
lands? Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who  
claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by  biblical mandate? Or with 
Fundamentalist Christians who believe that  Israel's expansion is a biblical  
necessity rather than a strategic judgment? 
There is,  however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can 
come from--the  minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much 
derided moderate  Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians. The alternative 
to the  secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual 
humility and  sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form 
of faith, and  to say it is, is the great lie of our time. 
There is also the  faith that is once born and never experiences a catharsis 
or "born-again"  conversion. There is the faith that treats the Bible as a 
moral fable as well as  history and tries to live its truths in the light of 
contemporary knowledge,  history, science and insight. There is a faith that draws 
important distinctions  between core beliefs and less vital ones--that picks 
and chooses between  doctrines under the guidance of individual  conscience. 
There is the  faith that sees the message of Jesus or Muhammad as a broad 
indicator of how we  should treat others, of what profound holiness requires, and 
not as an account  literally true in all respects that includes an elaborate 
theology that explains  everything. There is the dry Deism of many of 
America's  Founding Fathers. There is the cafeteria Christianity of, say, Thomas 
Jefferson,  who composed a new, shortened gospel that contained only the sayings of 
Jesus  that Jefferson inferred were the real words of the real rabbi. There 
is the  open-minded treatment of Scripture of today's Episcopalianism and the 
socially  liberal but doctrinally wayward faith of most lay Catholics. There is 
the  sacramental faith that regards God as present but ultimately unknowable, 
that  looks into the abyss and hopes rather than sees. And there are many, 
many more  varieties. 
But all those  alternative forms come back to the same root. Those kinds of 
faith recognize one  thing, first of all, about the nature of God and 
humankind, and it is this: If  God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass 
our human  understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we 
have  religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the 
divine. But  there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never  
know--because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our  
categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the  
kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will  
always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be  God. 
That faith begins  with the assumption that the human soul is fallible, that 
it can delude itself,  make mistakes and see only so far ahead. That, after 
all, is what it means to be  human. No person has had the gift of omniscience. 
Yes, Christians may want to  say that of Jesus. But even the Gospels tell us 
that Jesus doubted on the Cross,  asking why his own father seemed to have 
abandoned him. The mystery that  Christians are asked to embrace is not that Jesus 
was God but that he was  God-made-man, which is to say, prone to the feelings 
and doubts and joys and  agonies of being human. Jesus himself seemed to make 
a point of that. He taught  in parables rather than in abstract theories. He 
told stories. He had friends.  He got to places late; he misread the actions of 
others; he wept; he felt  disappointment; he asked as many questions as he 
gave answers; and he was often  silent in self-doubt or elusive or afraid. 
God-as-Omniscience, by definition, could do and be none  of those things. 
Hence, the sacrifice entailed in God becoming man. So, at the  core of the very 
Gospels on which fundamentalists rely for their passionate  certainty is a 
definition of humanness that is marked by imperfection and  uncertainty. Even in 
Jesus. Perhaps especially in  Jesus. 
As humans, we can  merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater 
coherence than  ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face. That is either 
funny or sad, and  humans stagger from one option to the other. Neither beasts 
nor angels, we live  in twilight, and we are unsure whether it is a prelude to 
morning or a prelude  to night. 
The 16th century  writer Michel de Montaigne lived in a world of religious 
war, just as we do. And  he understood, as we must, that complete religious 
certainty is, in fact, the  real blasphemy. As he put it, "We cannot worthily 
conceive the grandeur of those  sublime and divine promises, if we can conceive 
them at all; to imagine them  worthily, we must imagine them unimaginable, 
ineffable and incomprehensible, and  completely different from those of our 
miserable experience. 'Eye cannot see,'  says St. Paul, 'neither can it have entered 
into the heart of man, the happiness  which God hath prepared for them that 
love him.'" 
In that type of  faith, doubt is not a threat. If we have never doubted, how 
can we say we have  really believed? True belief is not about blind 
submission. It is about  open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent 
distance from the  truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can 
feed faith, rather  than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to 
recognize our  fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do 
not know. Which is  why we believe. 
In this sense,  our religion, our moral life, is simply what we do. A 
Christian is not a  Christian simply because she agrees to conform her life to some 
set of external  principles or dogmas, or because at a particular moment in her 
life, she  experienced a rupture and changed herself entirely. She is a 
Christian primarily  because she acts like one. She loves and forgives; she listens 
and prays; she  contemplates and befriends; her faith and her life fuse into 
an unself-conscious  unity that affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also 
makes it her own. In  that nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice 
is more important than  theory, love is more important than law, and mystery 
is seen as an insight into  truth rather than an obstacle. 
And that is how  that kind of faith interacts with politics. If we cannot 
know for sure at all  times how to govern our own lives, what right or business 
do we have telling  others how to live theirs? From a humble faith comes 
toleration of other faiths.  And from that toleration comes the oxygen that liberal 
democracy desperately  needs to survive. That applies to all faiths, from 
Islam to Christianity. In  global politics, it translates into a willingness to 
recognize empirical  reality, even when it disturbs our ideology and interests. 
>From moderate  religion comes pragmatic politics. From a deep understanding of 
human  fallibility comes the political tradition we used to call  
conservatism. 
I remember my  grandmother's faith. She was an Irish immigrant who worked as 
a servant for  priests. In her later years she lived with us, and we would go 
to Mass together.  She was barely literate, the seventh of 13 children. And 
she could rattle off  the Hail Mary with the speed and subtlety of a NASCAR lap. 
There were times when  she embarrassed me--with her broad Irish brogue and 
reflexive deference to  clerical authority. Couldn't she genuflect a little less 
deeply and pray a  little less loudly? And then, as I winced at her volume in 
my quiet church, I  saw that she was utterly oblivious to those around her. 
She was someplace else.  And there were times when I caught her in the middle 
of saying the Rosary when  she seemed to reach another level altogether--a 
higher, deeper place than I,  with all my education and privilege, had yet 
reached. 
Was that the  certainty of fundamentalism? Or was it the initiation into a 
mystery none of us  can ever fully understand? I'd argue the latter. The 18th 
century German  playwright Gotthold Lessing said it best. He prayed a simple 
prayer: "If God  were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his 
left hand only  the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the 
proviso that I would  always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the 
choice, I would with  all humility take the left hand, and say, Father, I will 
take this--the pure  Truth is for You alone." 
That sentiment is  as true now as it was more than two centuries ago when 
Lessing wrote it. Except  now the very survival of our civilization may depend on 
 it. 


Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
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