Asking the Small Personal Why

Why Do I believe in . . .

These thoughts are a similar to a piece, Asking the Great Cosmic Why, that I posted last June where I discussed my responses to life’s random tragedies. Hopefully, my ramblings here will be much less convoluted than that earlier post.

This post has been difficult to write for a couple of reasons. First, I had to go against my made-up family motto of “Believe Nothing Hastily.” It isn’t bad as far as mottos go and certainly beats my great Uncle Bud’s (WWI veteran and Depression survivor) motto “Money Spent on Food is Never Wasted” or my mother’s often repeated but humorously said motto “Life is Hard, Then You Die.” Second, as a well-practiced procrastinator, even before experiencing Parkinson’s induced apathy, I can always find a reason to not believe. I will just have to take Coleridge’s advice to willingly suspend [my] disbelief for the sake of this post.

I wrote “Why I believe” in the above trailer rather than “What I believe” which is a very different point of discussion. We will touch on that in a moment.

Then I had to decide if a preposition should follow the phrase. Should I include “in” thereby making the phrase a more abstract question of faith, as in why I believe in Freedom or why I believe in Little Chocolate Donuts or, in a nod to the remaining Baby Boomers still out there, why I believe in Me? English grammar can be tricky, so I decided to not out the in.

Semantically speaking, asking “Why I believe” rather than “Why I don’t believe” is much more difficult to answer. Conceptually, asking “Why I don’t believe” is much closer to the “What I believe” or “What I don’t believe” questions than it is to “Why I believe.” Words like “What” or “don’t” tend to dampen my inquiries through lists and doubts.

Many people cannot explain why they believe in most things, though they have no trouble telling others what they believe, hence the many religious and political creeds that exist.

After years of listening to constituents tell me what they believe to be true about politics (and in South Carolina politics that includes religion), I found that there are not so many who can explain why they believe it. I have had constituents paraphrase the Federalist Papers and the five points of Calvinism with a zeal often in direct proportion to their misunderstanding of both.

An aside for a future post . . .The recipe of mixing religious and political creeds together along with a leavening of populism creates a danger of mob rule. Jerry Seinfeld recently discussed this subject with Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast. While talking about the challenges with being a Jewish comedian and facing crowds in the current political climate, he said “Let’s just talk politically, left and right. You are watching mobs. They are mobs . . . that’s what a political party is. We are going to make up a bunch of nonsense and we will all agree to it, right?” Seinfeld’s observation brought to mind a comment made to me by a senior member of the SC House Republican Caucus after I was first elected. He compared being a member of the Caucus to being in an exclusive fraternity . . . or the mafia. Not exactly the kind of mob that Seinfeld referred to but just as dangerous. I tend to agree, but that discussion is for another time.

Why do we have a propensity to believe and where does our inclination to believe come from? I asked several lucky family members and friends who are Christians if they could explain why they believed in Jesus Christ. Most of them looked confused. I guess that I should have given them some warning.

Upon recovering from the shock of being asked, most stated the facts of what they believed about Jesus. All said that he is the Son of God, but again that only tells me a creedal statement from a list of attributes. It doesn’t tell me why a person innately has the desire to believe.

One might say that I have a cultural heritage to believe. I live in the rural South where within five minutes of leaving my driveway, I could arrive at one of eight churches - five Baptist, two Methodist and one Church of God of Prophecy - some of them old by American standards. From my porch, I can just glimpse the steeple of the Baptist church closest to my house, the church where I was baptized and whose electronic bells chime the noon hour each day.

Cultural heritage walks arm in arm with societal necessity. One could argue that I believe in Jesus Christ because churches provide a net positive benefit to my community and gives me an opportunity to network socially. However, churches merely instruct us what to believe. It is up to us individually to figure out why we believe. Plus, this option smacks of believing in a Chamber of Commerce Jesus.

Then there is the turn before I burn reason - a favorite subject of many sermons that I heard as a youth and an understandable, if not selfish, reason to believe. Amend that to “possibly burn” and you have Pascal’s wager. Pascal argued for the existence of God because a believer has much more to gain if God exists than an unbeliever has if God does not exist. Actually, his wager is a little more complicated, but you get the idea.

Beyond the wager there exists a further risk to us who believe in God and that Jesus Christ is His Son. Since I believe in Jesus, I have to believe in the totality of who he claims to be. If I do not, then he is a fraud and I am complicit in his crimes.

Both reasons fall into the “what I believe” category and never reveals the why. Plus, Pascal’s option makes for a plastic Jesus on my dashboard or turns Him into a lucky charm.

No matter if my Christian belief stems from personal encounters, societal interactions or just plain old fear for my soul, the why of it should be more simple than that.

Some might say it is by familial example that I believe. My mother read Bible stories to me when I was a small child. I still have the book that she would read from (or did I lend it out?) and from which I later learned to read. She took me to church at least three times a week and prayed over me daily. By any definition, I was indoctrinated at an early age to believe in Jesus . . . but so are many people who don’t believe as adults. While early indoctrination makes the suspension of disbelief easier, it doesn't explain the initial inclination to believe.

Ancillary to the question “why I believe” is the question of calling. Do I believe because I am called or am I called because I believe?

Scripture does not reveal the thought processes behind why the disciples responded to Jesus’s individual call. They came from all walks of life. Having dealt with clients, taxes and the IRS during my professional life, I have always had a soft spot for Matthew dba Levi the Tax Collector, so let’s look at his calling.

According to the three Scriptural accounts of Jesus calling Matthew, not much happened other than this: Matthew was sitting at his tax collection desk when Jesus walked by followed by a large crowd. Jesus called out to Matthew to “follow me” and he did, without question.

Later on, Matthew threw a big dinner party for Jesus and his followers. Matthew invited a bunch of his tax collector friends to attend. When the Pharisees got wind of the party, they showed up to condemn Jesus for dining with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus replied that he was there to call sinners to repent and (if you read the scripture with a sense of humor), implied that the Pharisees were too “righteous” to understand. In any event, the encounter between Jesus and Matthew as described “displays not the slightest interest in the psychological reasons for a man’s religious decisions” (Bonhoeffer. The Cost of Discipleship, p43). So, no simple answer there.

With Bonhoeffer out, let’s look to C. S. Lewis who surmised that his belief in God and ultimately in Jesus Christ, was inherent in his nature from the beginning. The fact that we have a notion of God proves His existence. There is no reason for humans to have made God up. Lewis’s argument follows the same ontological trek that Anselm of Canterbury made in 1079 AD.

Could the answer be as simple as God created us with the innate understanding of His existence and even in our disbelief we affirm His existence and that His Son calls to us daily? I believe it to be so.