Practicing Religion

Though both authors have spent a great deal of time supporting each other in the media and their books, their analyses of religion, while generally complementary, are a bit different. While Harris thinks that the world would be better off without any religion at all, Dawkins has, for example, a rather fond place for a certain kind of humanistic natural piety, of the type that Albert Einstein had, at the amazing complexity, beauty and unlikeliness of the Universe. Such a piety in Dawkins hands does not, however, yield any other beliefs or particular actions, but rather simple forms a certain kind of a background mood, almost a soundtrack of awe and humility, to the ordinary and everyday challenges of being human.

Both these books are quite interesting, and while it certainly would be worthwhile to take up any number of their claims at greater length, today I bring them up only to note one feature of their analyses about religion, and that has to do with their general understandings of the relationship between belief and religion. In the wake of 9/11, and with particular attention to the number of polls in the United States indicating the large segments of the public that disbelieve key findings of scientific research in favor of religiously inspired beliefs-such as design over evolution, or the age of the Universe being just under 6,000 years rather than, say, approximately 13.7 Billion years old-both these authors set out to argue that religious belief, and with it religion, is fundamentally irrational, fundamentally incompatible with any reasonable approach to the world.

It is this claim of rationality (or, I suppose, the accusation of fundamental irrationality) that concerns me most today, for what I want to focus on is the relationship between belief and practice in religion. I should say at the outset that I share many of Dawkins' and Harris's concerns about rationality, and also about moral results, of particular religious beliefs. But what I want to think about today is this presumption that these two authors have of taking religion to be, first and foremost, fundamentally a matter of belief, and only secondarily of practice or action. In both of their views, if you would simply fix the religious belief problem, namely by getting rid of religious beliefs altogether, then the many human atrocities perpetuated under the various ideologies of religions would disappear, and presumably, a better and better life would ensue for us all.

Now, I am not trying to suggest that they are altogether wrong in making this claim, since it is certainly true that a number of terrible things are done directly out of people holding particular religious beliefs. Thus I am not out by any means to defend all religion, for religion, as William James noted in his Varieties of Religious Experience, is by itself not inherently a good or a bad thing. As James notes in his analysis of lives of religious saints, virtually every kind of obvious religious good can be taken to extremes that turn out to have bad fruits for life, either for the individual or for society more broadly. Thus religion on its own doesn't inherently make for good. What I do want to suggest to you today, however, is that belief as we normally understand it is not, in fact, the autonomous basis or foundation of religion, however often it might be potrayed as such by religions or religious critics. Rather, religious beliefs and religion (and here I suppose I mean both fruitful and dangerous religion) really depend much more heavily on practice. Hence my title today, of "practicing religion."

Just after I graduated from College in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I traveled to Geneva Switzerland to take up an internship I had arranged at the World Council of Churches Headquarters there. (This was back in 1985, just after the World Council had been in the world news for allegedly funding the militant Namibian South West African Peoples Organization, which was seeking to bring about an end to Apartheid in South Africa.) For the months that I was there, I had the singular privilege of living with a local family, one that, as it turned out, really could only communicate to me in French, which in my case was a bit of a challenge at the time. This family, who are friends to this day, had nothing to do with the work of the World Council, having only accidental acquaintance with my boss at the council. But showing what I have learned is characteristic hospitality, they took me in as if I were a member of their family, and integrated me into all their activities. As a result, I met a wide number of friends and acquaintances of theirs who were ordinary French speaking Swiss citizens.

Inevitably, at these dinner parties or other social events, I would be introduced as an American working at the World Council of Churches, to whomever our guests or hosts were. And equally inevitably, after having to answer for the actions of Ronald Reagan or Jesse Helms, I would be asked by one or another person whether I was religious, presumably since I worked at the World Council of Churches. The first time this happened, I thought this was a logical, if perhaps naive question, since it seemed likely that I would be religious if I were working with a church organization. But after answering "yes, I suppose I am religious" the first time this question was posed, I was surprised by the immediate follow-up question: "but are you a believer?" Clearly, I had misunderstood something about what the first questions meant, since to me being religious certainly implied believing, at least believing something. What, I thought to myself, does this person mean asking me these two questions?

The first time this happened, I was puzzled. And, with my French then so rudimentary, I wasn't sure I exactly understood what was being conveyed, much less how to engage about this. But the second time I was asked the same thing (fortunately, some weeks later, so that my French was a bit more useful), I responded with questions of my own, trying to understand what this distinction between religiousness and belief was about. What came out of that discussion proved to be very important, I think, to understanding religion more broadly, at least for me.

In English, or American English at least, I don't think the term "religious" has quite the same meaning that it had in this context. Specifically, after I chatted with my new Swiss friends, I came to understand that being "religious" for them had to do with living a certain way, with practicing a particular religion, and doing all (or most) that it implied and required. Belief, in connection with this, turned out to swing freely from religiousness. One could, it turns out, be religious without necessarily believing everything, or perhaps even anything, connected with the particular religious tradition in question. This would mean doing what was required-going to services, observing the holidays, following the kind of life envisioned morally and socially, perhaps, but without necessarily assenting to the various "doctrinal" or propositional claims that the religious tradition also claimed. (One might illustrate this with the example of observant Jews in America who keep the commandments and practice their Judaism without necessarily assenting to various propositional beliefs about the existence of God, or the nature of the world, etc., about which the Torah sometimes speaks. Moses ben Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar, would have seen no problem with this either.) And conversely to this model, one could believe, but without practicing the religion-without being religious-in any meaningful sense.

Now such a distinction is, I hope you will agree, explicable in English, but it's really not how most Americans frequently talk, or certainly not how most Christian influenced subsets of our culture talk. But the notion that it is founded on, that belief and practice may hinge freely at points from one another, raises very interesting questions both for understanding what we mean by "religion" or religiousness, and also for understanding how belief and practice are interrelated.

I've mentioned William James once already, but-and this is an occupational hazard of being a James scholar-I need to go back to him again to think a bit further about this. James is, as some of you may know, notable in the history of philosophy for popularizing the term "pragmatism." Pragmatism is a common term now, often used in the media to talk about political decisions wherein one simply does what is popular, rather than acting on principle. But James and John Dewey were after a philosophical view of pragmatism that had to do with how we understand concepts and ideas. What they sought to do was to show how the meaning, and ultimately the truth of ideas depend on the ultimate consequences they implied or incurred in the complete environment around them. Heavily influenced by the scientific method, this philosophical pragmatism sought to make belief accountable to actual practical consequences in the real world. And, in contrast to the political use of the term "pragmatism," this always implies consequences in the long run, and with regard to the whole, to the widest scope of evidence and experience. Thus pragmatism makes the practice of testing, and living out particular "Belief hypotheses," particular beliefs that are in quesiton, the key task in assessing beliefs, rather than merely subjecting them to rational or logical analysis and then declaring their truth or falseness in advance. James was, it is interesting to note, engaged in developing pragmatism in part because he thought it offered a way to correlate the practice and findings of science with what he took to be the obviously meaningful and important contributions of religion, both individually and socially considered. And the chief way to do this, James thought, was to recognize how fundamental practice is not only to religion, but to every form of human life, ordinary and religious beliefs included.

In addition to noting the various psychological contributions to human lives that religion often makes (for example, the conversion and salvation narratives for which the Varieties discussion is so famous), James also thought that religion proved to be a special kind of motivator towards moral visions for human life and society, if not also a source for them directly. (The Christian idea of love of the neighbor, or the Jain-influenced idea of non-violence evidenced in Ghandi's life and work both seem to be good examples not only of relatively novel visions of human life, but also of religious motivations when animated within their respective religious contexts.) Religious beliefs comprise a certain sort of a wager, on James's view, giving a vision for a different sort of an outcome that present circumstances and evidences don't necessarily predict or warrant, and mapping out a set of practices that might bring them about should we only "will to believe," and "will to act" on their basis. Last Sunday's celebration of Martin Luther King Day brings to mind the kind of hope evidenced in the Civil Rights Movement, wherein the vision of a different future, and the vision of a set of practices to bring it about, galvanized both social groups and individuals to bring about something unexpected, and unexpectable, on the basis of the rational evidence ready to hand. Not all things are possible, but certain things that are almost unimaginable-like having an African American candidate for president be the presumptive front-runner for one of the two major parties before the race has even begun-may come about as a result of such practically oriented religious imagination and belief.

My point here is not to say that religion is simply about practice, and that issues of belief, or vision, or truth, are irrelevant. No, not at all. What I do want to claim, however, is that belief itself is not the key to religiosity, and certainly not to the goods that religions and religiousness can forward or bring into being. Rather, such beliefs only find their real meaning in religious practice, in the sustained, attentive, unrelenting and committed task of practicing religion. The forms these practices may take are many, and perhaps innumerable. And the inherent moral ambiguity-the risk-of all of these forms cannot be somehow isolated and excised from them. Thus the only thing that can vouchsafe the goodness of religious practice, and hence of religion, is more good religious practice, more religious practice mindful of and accountable to our changing understandings of our individual and collective needs and goods. And our beliefs, at least our religious beliefs and our beliefs about religion, would do well to be mindful of this priority of practice.

Let me take you again with me back to Switzerland. These is, as many of you certainly know, a rather simple delicacy well-known across the Swiss cantons, but particularly typical in the French-speaking part of the Alps. I speak, of course, of Swiss fondue. This delicacy is usually made with at least two types of cheeses depending on where you are, Gruyere and Vacherin, or Gruyere and Emmenthal-the "paradigmatic" Swiss cheese with the large holes. Stir in some Kirsch cherry liquer, or local Swiss white wine, and melt slowly before placing the earthenware pot over a small flame on the table, and you have a simple but delicious meal to warm anyone on the coldest and darkest nights.

The Swiss Romande-the French speaking Swiss-take their fondue very seriously. This was apparent to me from the outset, what with setting the cubes of french bread out just the right amount of time before eating so that they were adequately stale, but not too hard. And then there was the peeled clove of garlic at each place to be gently rubbed on each piece before dipping it into the fondue, and swirling it gently, thus layering the cheese onto the bread ever so nicely while also keeping the cheese from separating in the pot. But nothing, and I mean nothing, of this care or delicacy compares, I learned, with what the committed fondue afficionado can produce if they have the vision, and the willingness to attend consistently, to the ever diminishing amount of cheese cooking over an open canister of fuel. What is at stake is something only for the dedicated, only for the one who is religious about their attending to the fondue. And that is, indeed quite literally, something that the French-speaking Swiss refer to in the case of fondue as "the religious"-la religieuse in French.

As the fondue cooks over the open flame, and the amount of cheese begins to diminish, the heat on the pot coming from the can of fuel under it stays exactly the same. This is, you might imagine, a certain recipe for burning the last of the fondue, and making the pot completely impossible to clean. But in the right hands, and with concerted and unwavering attention and care, not to mention practice, this almost certain kitchen disaster can be transformed into a culinary masterpiece, a perfectly browned, crisp wafer of cheese residuum, carefully aggregated by swirling the remaining viscous cheese over the flame and simultaneously pried up edge by edge ever so carefully as the last of the cheese browns sequentially from the outer circle of the sterno's reach toward the center. When well achieved, this lace cookie of cheese rewards its maker with the most delicious of conclusions to a lovely meal, a concentration of the essences of the fondue with a hint of caramel, truly a just desert. And when ignored, or not imagined and practically, even relentlessly sought, la religieuse is not brought into being at all; instead one is met with an incinerated mass of milk solids, chemically bonded to porcelain so efficiently such that neither pot nor cheese is of any use or value whatsoever. The religious is for the one who believes in the prospect of this inimitable good, and attends without significant delay or lapse, to its deliverance.

Belief is often crucial to religion, and certainly in the case of our own society and world, the challenges of particular religious beliefs require us to rise to their critical evaluation. But it is not beliefs alone that bring about the numerous bad results, much less the myriad imaginable goods, that are possible with religion. Rather, it is, more fundamentally, our practices. And these goods that we imagine religiously, I would suggest, can't be had simply by getting our minds right, much less by simply getting rid of our wrong beliefs. Rather, they can only be had by our continually searching out and enacting modes of practice that feed our minds and souls, but also improve our bodies and world, day in and day out, bit by bit. This is our religious task.

David C. Lamberth