Humility without religion
Faith begins humbly, but then undermines humility in the True Believer
A man asked his mentor how to tame his ego. The mentor told him to learn humility by putting on a sandwich-board sign with a fanatical message like “The end is near!” and spend the day pedaling his bike around a sophisticated business district. He did it, and it was humbling. But that night, as he took off the sign, he heard himself saying: “There isn’t another person in this city with the strength and courage to do what I have done today”.
Such is the insidious power of ego. I have known my share of pride, jealousy, and the cancerous desire to control others. During my 30 years as a Christian minister I often fought against these impulses (and sometimes sublimated and justified them instead of fighting).
The ego is no small problem, but I’ll not make that case here. For more on this, read Ryan Holiday’s excellent book Ego is the Enemy, which blends modern insights with Stoic philosophy.
If ego is the enemy, the solution is appropriate humility — not “I am a bug, worthless” but rather a sober and realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses, along with an appreciation of how much I can learn from others.
During my ministry years, I thought (and preached) that Christianity was the way to tame the ego monster. Christian salvation begins, after all, with the acknowledgement that “I am a sinner, unacceptable to God, unable to make myself worthy of him”.
This declaration is one I made when I was seven years old — too young to understand sin or rebellion, too young to weigh evidence for the existence of God — but old enough to know about feeling unworthy and about the need to find acceptance by doing the things important people in my life told me to do. Belonging often trumps facts.
Nevertheless, recognizing one’s shortcomings is a good way to begin a spiritual or moral journey. Despite the problems I now have with leading a child to confess the blackness of his soul, I still think it can be valuable to reflect (especially as adults) on how little we do to earn the good things in our lives, and how much we owe to the kindness of others and to the luck of being born here and now.
But here’s the problem. Once you get past the initial repentance and enter the family of faith, things change. The emphasis shifts from “I’m just grateful to be here” to
“…you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession…” (from 1 Peter 2:9).
God’s grace got me in the door. But now I’m part of the favored tribe, the ultimate in-group. After that, it’s natural to demonize outsiders who, unlike me, were too unlucky to find God’s grace. The New Testament does that very pointedly:
“This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister” (1 John 3:10).
Never mind that people on the inside of the faith, including leaders, sometimes fail to “do what is right”. It’s the outsiders we’re focused on here, and by their misdeeds, they actually show themselves to be…what? Not simply flawed, or mistaken, or merely human…but actual children of the devil. That’s literally demonizing your enemies.
The chosen people mentality leads quickly to a quest for doctrinal purity (the better to identify the “most-chosen” among us), and then to division (there’s the history of the church in a nutshell). And the best test of doctrinal purity? Whether you agree with me. As one passage says about some former friends in the faith:
“They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us” (1 John 2:19).
The “no true Scotsman” fallacy is a favorite way to exclude troublesome believers.
With regard to appropriate humility, here is where all of this often leads:
Us vs. Them — This is one of our basest, most tribal, most human impulses. A believer may truly want to lead an unbeliever to faith. But until that happens, the dichotomy of enlightened vs. unenlightened, saved vs. damned, chosen vs. not, stands in the way of the believer truly hearing, seeing, and learning from the “unsaved”.
Too stupid or rebellious to believe — If God’s message is for everyone, why do so many reject it or ignore it? As a pastor I came to see that some people are so hurt by abuse or horrible circumstances that they can’t conceive of a loving God watching over everything. Other folks are mystified by the gap between modern science and ancient origin stories. Some people don’t want the moral confines of religion. Most people without faith simply don’t live within a plausibility structure that makes belief likely. But for the true believer, there can be only one answer: Some people just don’t want to believe. That’s the only way their understanding of this life can make sense. There can be no such thing as honest unbelief. Everyone gets a chance to see the truth. Some people are just too stupid or rebellious to see it. Perhaps these rebels were actually created by God to be destroyed for their rebellion, as one interpretation of Romans 9:22 has it. It’s hard to think of a point-of-view that undermines humility better than that.
Me, a King’s Kid — A popular evangelical belief (with a dubious biblical basis) is that, if you were the only person who ever lived, Christ would still die for you. This personalization of God’s attention is not taught by all branches of Christianity, but for many evangelicals it implies that God is so involved in their lives that he finds them parking spaces, blesses their IRA, and has a personal plan for their lives.
Of course I’m over-simplifying. Actually, the promise of being part of a “chosen people” doesn’t affect everyone the same. For the downtrodden and powerless, the effect might be a net-positive. Religion can be their ticket (maybe the only one available) into a community that gives belonging, meaning, and hope. (This is no argument for pacifying people with false hopes. I’m speaking only of the effect).
The effect of being one of the chosen is quite different for the aging American Boomer Evangelical, the kind of believer I know best, who is accustomed to privilege and used to being listened to, who feels threatened by immigration, gay marriage, and general “wokeness”. For such believers, the us vs. them part of faith can color every part of their worldview, leading them to remake their churches into armies (literally if necessary) in the culture war, grabbing onto any means necessary and following any leader necessary to win the economic and political battles that they hope will make them feel safe again. Such is the plight of a large segment of the church today. Appropriate humility is the last thing on their minds. Humility of any kind is completely absent from the leaders they admire.
All of this is to say that I eventually found that the stories that the faithful tell each other tend to undermine appropriate humility. And I really need more appropriate humility. How do I get it?
I’m no expert. The one thing I have found consistently helpful (besides reading the aforementioned Ego is the Enemy) is to practice gratitude. I wrote about gratitude recently, and I can say that my too-infrequent efforts to think through all the good things that have come my way have also revealed to me how little I had to do with bringing them about. I hope this leads me into a deeper appreciation for other people, and a greater ability to learn from them.
This would be appropriate humility.
