The Danger of True Believers
Truth lives in nuance. True Belief has little patience for that.
In 2006 I saw the movie United 93, a dramatization of the events on the only hijacked flight on 9/11 that failed to reach its destination. Most of the drama centered on the capture of the jet by the hijackers, and their eventual overpowering by passengers. But during the early moments of the film, we caught a glimpse of these young men not simply as criminals or terrorists, and certainly not as insane lunatics. Instead, we saw them as True Believers, men on a mission. They had an idea in their minds that this action they were attempting was the most important thing they could do. In the war between good and evil, they were warriors, stakeholders. They were certain that they would make a difference. On the side of good, of course.
Five years earlier, when the attacks occurred, I was not quite halfway through what turned out to be a thirty-year ministry at a mid-sized church, and I was sure of more things than I am today. I hadn’t yet encountered the work of Christopher Hitchens, which I mentioned at the start of this series, but I had met the Mormon missionaries I described in part two, and had already begun to think about my own plausibility structures and confirmation bias (part three).
Still, in 2001 I was pretty sure that the problem that caused 9/11 was simple: False religion. Zealots had attacked based on their religious beliefs. Bad ideas produce bad behavior. The problem, as I saw it then, wasn’t that these guys were True Believers but that they were fanatically devoted to very bad ideas which they had been taught since childhood and which they probably never had the chance to question.
By 2006, however, I suspected that the problem wasn’t just the bad ideas but also the fanatical devotion. True Belief brings with it an absolute certainty that tends to stomp out questioning and humility and to overrun thoughtful examination. Sure, these young men were devoted to unexamined ideas. But at their age, so was I. What might it have taken to push me into fanaticism? Poverty, powerlessness, or a lack of direction might have done it. The past few years have provided more examples of this than I could have imagined.
And I began to recognize that I lived and taught in a culture that, to some extent, venerated True Belief and denigrated uncertainty, reasonable doubt, and humility.
In the early 90s I occasionally stood on the side of the road holding an anti-abortion sign. Not by myself. This was an annual thing people from our church did along with other Christians to get the word out that, as we saw it, God was against abortion. I didn’t enjoy this, but I was against abortion then and didn’t want to be labeled a coward, so I held up one of two signs: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” or “Jesus Heals and Forgives”. We always got many friendly waves, a few middle fingers and a lot of nervous staring-straight-ahead. Not everyone at our church participated, and a few disliked our involvement. These were the early days of the culture wars, before most of the pro-choice Christians were drummed out of the church or cowed into silence.
There was another sign that wasn’t part of our displays, but which was common in those days and with which many of us agreed: “Abortion is Murder”. This was the motto of the True Believer. If someone believes that a new human is created at every conception, and that this new human ought to be treated as fully human from that moment on (and this IS what many pro-life Christians believe, and they believe too that the Bible teaches this, although that’s not as obvious as they think), then to intentionally end even the earliest of pregnancies is to commit murder.
Whenever someone back then would attack an abortion clinic worker, the response from the church was always swift condemnation. “We must never combat murder by becoming murderers”. I agreed with this reaction, and yet I knew it laid bare the illogic of my position. If someone was about to commit murder, wouldn’t it be reasonable and justifiable to use deadly force to stop them? I think it would be. But that meant that I didn’t really think abortion was murder, exactly. It was something else. An ethical issue, a thorny one that perhaps some people take too lightly, but not murder. And then I had to admit that the True Believers in this case, the violent ones, were the most consistent, and I was inconsistent. And so were all the Christians I knew. And our inconsistency was a good thing.
All of this is to say that truth lives in nuance. Or, to apply some nuance to that statement, truth usually lives in nuance and the whole truth rarely lives in the fanaticism of True Belief.
Most of us on the picket line weren’t True Believers in that cause. We were against abortion, but the issue didn’t occupy a lot of our time or emotion. We were content to “get the message out” and to support “positive alternatives”. This, I thought, was a reasonable attitude. But it isn’t reasonable if abortion is murder.
And in fact, the dream of the pro-life movement has never been merely to limit abortions or to persuade most women to not have one. The goal has always been to overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion illegal. This vision has so gripped the evangelical right-wing that this branch of Christianity — the faith of my youth — has, when it comes to political activism, largely rejected issues of personal character, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, and has turned exclusively to power as the tool to achieve this all-important goal.
This is quite a shift from the goal (as I understood it) in the early 90s, to elect “godly” people of character who would pull the nation in a more “righteous” direction. For the True Believer, the cause is everything, so everything must be sacrificed for it. Including, I think, the very soul of the faith.
In the past few years, a larger cause has seized the imagination of many evangelicals — Christian Nationalism, the desire to rule the United States by the laws of the Bible (especially the Old Testament). I don’t know how strong this movement will become, but it certainly represents the fevered dreams of the True Believers, and it reminds me that Christopher Hitchens used to say that when people start talking about perfecting society, the bodies start to pile up. True belief doesn’t leave room for nuance. Or dissenters.
As I began to understand that truth lives in nuance, the world expanded for me. I could see, for example, that human motivations (including my own) are complex. People can do terrible things out of their own desperation or their misguided desire to do something good. People can do good things out of selfishness and the desire to gain advantages over others. Life is complicated and people are difficult to understand. None of this is exactly rocket science, but to an extent, my own True Belief had limited my ability to see and apply it.
But whatever the benefits I gained, my appreciation of nuance seemed, more and more, to hinder me as a minister. Over the last decade, our culture, and the church along with it, has grown impatient with nuance. This is an age of the passionate intensity of True Belief.
I mentioned in an earlier article that I first entered the ministry out of a youthful desire to be on the side of truth. The youthful part is gone, but the desire remains. Now I found the desire for truth leading me away from my spiritual home, my tribe, and my job.
A little more on that here (Abortion, homosexuality, and the truth that lives in nuance).
