Zero Gravity: Why the Christian Faith is Elusive Today
An essay published by Comment Magazine
For roughly the past two years, I’ve been trying to describe and make theological sense of the contradictions of my spiritual experience—contradictions which I believe go beyond the mundane fact of the sinful human condition and beyond the more unique reality of my own personal life. The chief contradiction, the one at the source of all the others, is that the Christian faith is true and yet at times seems not to exert force or to resonate with life. Something about the experience of faith feels simultaneously hollow, but nevertheless all-important. I suspect there are others whose faith lives feel similar.
One outcome of this effort to make sense of this contradictoriness is an essay I wrote, which Comment Magazine has kindly published. I hope you find it helpful.
A familiar story: At an adult faith formation class I was teaching at a church, a woman in her sixties raised her hand. She explained that she’s a pastor’s wife and that she felt devastated by the presidency of Donald Trump and couldn’t find her emotional footing. She was wondering if her long-time dedication to progressive politics contributed to the loss of faith suffered by her two adult daughters. They’re good people, she said, and they’ve done well for themselves. But they don’t believe—and they don’t seem to feel like they’re missing anything. One daughter calls herself an atheist, the other an agnostic. Do I think, she asked me, that her liberal Christian faith is partly to blame for this outcome?
When we listen to the stories of church members, one of the things invisible to polling data but obvious to anyone who has spent any amount of time in church is that the line between the church affiliated and the church disaffiliated is not at all sharply defined.
I hear these stories often. There are morally and politically conservative versions: it makes no difference; the major plot points are the same. Again and again, parents who have found meaning in faith and in the life of the church discover that their children want nothing to do with Christianity. They wonder where they went wrong.
What is usually unacknowledged in stories like these is that, very often, religiously disaffiliated children have not failed to inherit their parents’ faith; rather, they have inherited it all too well—they’ve merely discarded its accidental elements. If the Christian faith is understood as a motivator to support progressive political causes, nothing essential is lost if children grow up to be such good Democrats that they no longer need religious motivations.
Many parents grieving that their children are not Christians are also giving voice to another grief, deeper but unnamed: that there is something more to the Christian faith than they ever learned to grasp or express, but they’re not sure what it is. What they received from church was not the highest expression of purpose and meaning. The vital element of faith has eluded them.
Consider the inverse. I myself am struck by how much I identify with the experience of my non-religious friends. Except for rare and precious moments, I don’t feel like God exists and is present and active in my life. And even though I believe God is active and present, I also know that faith in God is more than metaphysical opinion. I have often wondered whether, if my Christian friends felt the way I feel, they would call themselves atheists or agnostics. To my relief, they report the same experiences. And yet, like me, my friends consider their faith in God to be the central feature of their lives—their “ultimate concern.”
When it comes to the state of faith today, the challenge is not just that the neat, measurable categories—religious believer, agnostic, atheist, spiritual but not religious, religiously unaffiliated, and so on—are inadequate. It is also that by focusing on such a narrow set of questions, we leave the most important matters unexamined.
My most profound flashes of doubt in the existence of God, for instance, have been at church. I’ve sat with philosophical arguments against the existence of God, but none have had the same force as sitting in church and being overwhelmed by the feeling that nothing being said matters, the feeling that the church’s very life screams, “We don’t take this stuff too seriously.”
Faith is more than belief. Coming to faith is like coming into a powerful gravitational field, being grasped and pulled into orbit imperceptibly, and requiring nothing less than that you entrust your whole life to its mysterious force. My flashes of doubt are not primarily intellectual doubts. They are, rather, a feeling that the centre of my life is without warning losing its weightiness, its gravity, and that it is therefore losing its hold on me, and I my confidence in it, that at any moment I will drift out into the darkness and cold.
To feel that something has lost its gravity renders the question of its existence secondary: Even if it exists, who cares? The social conflicts we experienced as children felt total and eternal when we were young, but age revealed how small these problems were. These problems lost their gravity.
When the object of our faith loses its gravitational pull on us, that means it either doesn’t exist or isn’t up to the job of centring our lives; in other words, the loss of gravity entails either atheism or idolatry. Since something always centres our lives, atheism and idolatry amount to the same thing—we all have an ultimate concern and are “atheists” toward the gods of other people, considering these gods idols.
The vexing puzzle of the Christian experience today is that our talk of God seems biblical and therefore difficult to indict for idolatry, but it has lost its gravity. We are theoretically in proximity to its object, but it exerts no force on us. Even if we keep showing up or keep identifying ourselves as Christians, we find it harder and harder to articulate the necessity and unconditional importance of this faith. It is as though we have settled for an idol.
Though there are surely exceptions, few people I know feel that they get much out of church, regardless of denomination. Many clergy I know would do something else if they could. They haven’t stopped believing. They haven’t stopped yearning to be grasped by the ultimate in faith. But what they are offered in the life of the church takes no hold of them, nor offers them anything worth holding on to.
What theological sense can be made of this experience of being adrift within the life of faith?
To answer that question, one must answer a prior question about where this gravitas that generates faith originates and how we experience it: What in human experience are we referring to when we speak of God’s faith-generating activity in us? That is, what are we referring to in our own experience that we interpret as God acting on and within us? Can it be described in mundane, everyday language? Can anything more be said than the mere assertion that God acts to give us faith?
This is powerful..."the loss of gravity entails either atheism or idolatry. Since something always centres our lives, atheism and idolatry amount to the same thing".
Excellent definition of "The Problem" - everyone on Planet Earth should read this post and ponder. Then one should advance to the obvious: The "Solution" hasn't been taught, because to be able to teach the solution, one must first be taught what the solution is. But to be taught what the solution is, we have to "seek" to be taught, which means we must seek out the Teacher of Truth: The Holy Spirit. In fact, The Holy Spirit Taught me that the Spirit of Faith is the Bride of Christ, Living and growing within us to maturity; so when Jesus Stated: "O you of little Faith", He was speaking to His child Bride, thus helping Her - dwelling within His Disciples and within us - to grow, mature and flourish. His Statement of "little Faith" was exquisitely the most Loving and gigantic Statement in His recorded sayings. This is why "the church feels disconnected; they've never been taught this. Her Spirit is The Bride of Christ and Her Name is "Faith". Nice to meet you. Blessings