Derek admired his friends who had faith. They seemed to have a confidence about them that he wouldn’t mind sharing. Yet Derek wasn’t sure what, exactly, faith was. Oh, he knew all about religion or at least enough to feel that religion wasn’t exactly for him. He had a negative view of religious types, even though he couldn’t think of anyone he knew who fit that type. Derek only knew the popular mockery of the religious, without knowing anyone who fit that bill. But Derek was also uncomfortable with just waking up and believing something without any special justification for it, except to belong to some sort of religious cult. Yet he wasn’t sure that his friends of faith whom he admired did belong to religious cults. They seemed instead to have friends and acquaintances of all kinds, maybe even more friends and acquaintances of different types than those who did not have faith.
Definition
Faith, in its broader definition, is confidence or trust in things we cannot directly perceive or have not yet occurred. We have faith that our spouse will be at home when we return. We have faith that our hard work will produce a reasonable return and that our employer will come through with our paycheck. We have faith in the banking system, entrusting it with our savings. We are faithful to our spouse and employer. We have faith that the military will protect us from foreign invasion and the police will protect us from domestic crime. We have faith that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening. We also have faith that our rest will restore us and that our heart will continue to beat. We place our faith in the medical profession and their regimens, and the legal system and its procedures. We exhibit faith everywhere, in dozens of ways.
Necessity
In that broader sense, faith is necessary to function with any degree of normalcy and efficacy in human society and the natural world. You cannot get out of bed in the morning without already having engaged in minute acts of faith. Why else rise at all, if you had no expectation of the reliability of things being as they were when you went to bed? Indeed, the greater your concerted effort toward a desired end, the greater your faith. If all you expect out of a day, no matter how hard you try, is bare survival in the midst of misery, then you’d do no more than necessary to survive. But if, instead, you believe you can paint a masterpiece for the ages or build a cathedral that will inspire millions across a thousand years, you will strain with every last fiber of your being to accomplish that unseen and difficult but possible end. You’ll have faith beyond your vision, even beyond your grasp. Faith is necessary both for bare survival and for anything greater than that. Your vision, reach, and effort will be in proportion to your faith.
Unseen
The key attribute of faith is that it has to do with the unseen but trusted, the invisible but anticipated and believed to be real. It’s not faith to trust what you already have in hand. It takes little or no faith to buy yourself a breakfast at the diner with cash out of your wallet. You already have everything you need at hand. Yet putting in the time and effort to learn a skill, in the hope and expectation that your exercise of that skill will put cash in your wallet for breakfast, can take a great deal of faith. Rising, striving, reaching, assessing, and refining with passion and purpose all take faith in the invisible but intelligible structures, patterns, powers, and principles on which your hope of reward relies. Faith is that degree of confidence you have that the things you cannot see but yet you believe exist will reward the actions you take as a consequence of your belief.
Confidence
Your confidence in the unseen but trusted things is another key aspect of faith. You’d probably loan your friend $10, having enough faith in your friend to trust in the modest money’s return. But would you loan the same friend $100 or $1,000? If so, then you’d be exhibiting more faith in your friend. But how about loaning your friend $10,000 or $100,000? You’d be exhibiting quite a bit more faith. Faith always relies on confidence, but confidence comes in degrees. To have complete faith is to stake one’s life on the unseen thing being true or coming to pass as you hope and expect. Leaders who strike out boldly at mortal risk to pursue things others believe unattainable, and then achieve them or die failing when others later achieve them, exhibit that extreme faith. Generally, people who question their own faith have some faith and maybe even substantial faith but not the confidence that they would like to exhibit. Construe the question of your own faith as a matter not only of belief in the as-yet unattained thing but also confidence in the belief.
Lack
Just as you can observe great faith by those who devote their time, resources, and effort to difficult things, and even stake their lives on those things, you can also observe a lack of faith. Schoolchildren who put forth little effort toward their studies may lack belief in the value of the knowledge and skills the curriculum would have them learn. Or they may lack belief that they can attain the valuable knowledge and skill through their own effort. By contrast, the striving student who fails repeatedly before finally achieving the breakthrough shows great faith, believing in both the goal and the student’s ability with effort to attain it. Mental illnesses like delusion and depression may have physiological, chemical, situational, or other causes. Yet delusion and depression can manifest themselves as if the sufferer does not believe in the thing, its value, or the ability to attain it. Freedom might be right in front of the deluded one who only sees bars, and joy might be within ready reach of the depressed one who only sees despair. Faith is thus a right view of unseen or unattained things that may well lie within possibility, capability, and reach.
Volition
That’s not to blame anyone. Don’t mistake faith as if it were entirely a choice. Faith unquestionably has a degree of volition, choice, or will to it. You can, to a degree, believe or not believe. But only to a degree. Circumstances like mental illness and incompetence can certainly interfere with an individual’s ability to adopt a stance of faith and act in faith. And even when one has the mental acuity to choose, other embedded beliefs and perspectives may make it much harder to choose. So, for instance, a child raised in a family of traditional faith may embed beliefs and perspectives that make it relatively easy, when an adult, to choose a life of faith. Yet if the same child suffers some stress reaction within the family involving the issue of faith, that reaction may become a severe obstacle for the child to continue on, when an adult, with the same faith tradition. Choice is one thing. The ease or difficulty of the choice, including various other beliefs, perspectives, experiences, and incentives or disincentives, is quite another thing. Don’t judge another too harshly for a lack of faith. Their environment may have given them every reason not to have faith.
Belief
An equally common or more common definition of faith, though, has to do with religious belief. When people refer to faith, they are often referring to belief in a particular religion and to participation in religious traditions and rituals. Religious faith is not entirely distinct from faith in its broader definition. Rather, one can consider religious faith to be a subset of the broader category of faith in the ordinary sense of the term. In other words, religious belief or religious faith, like the broader form of faith, has to do with confidence in unseen things, enough to act in accord with those invisible things. It’s just that religious faith takes a specially recognized, structured, expressed, and traditionally conveyed form. When used within and outside of the religious context, the terms belief and faith are approximately synonymous, although the two words have slightly different connotations. Belief refers primarily to the mental aspect of the considered thing, while faith further implies reliance on the thing in action. You may, for instance, believe in the existence of God but not place your faith in God. Likewise, you may believe in the existence of the U.S. government but not place your faith in it. Faith may thus be the more positive, affirmative, and attractive condition. Friends might admire one another’s faith. Belief may thus be the more cautious or even critical term. A detractor might mock another’s religious beliefs.
Religion
Like the terms faith and belief, the term religion can carry a great deal of baggage. Clarifying the term can relieve one of misconceptions and relieve the term of its baggage. The term religion doesn’t have to refer to traditional religious belief systems like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or quasi-religious philosophical belief systems like Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Religion in its broader sense generally refers to any set of philosophical or ethical beliefs that include some degree or form of practice, discipline, or ritual that carries the belief system into effect. That’s why we can sometimes say that someone is religious about doing something, like picking up after oneself or ensuring that everything is safe and secure. One believes in the advisability of the action and thus engages in it with sufficient discipline or ritual to prove one’s belief. That’s also why we can sometimes say that someone has made a religion out of something, like immersing oneself so deeply in a sci-fi film series or in a hobby that it becomes one’s context for life. Let’s be fair: the non-religious believe things, too, and carry out their belief in religious or ritualistic fashion.
Binding
The etymology or root of the word religion can help us understand that to which it refers, while further relieving the term of its obscuring baggage. The Latin root word of religion has to do with binding, connecting, or unifying, that is, of drawing things together or even of repeating and affirming them. And that, friends, is what belief systems of any kind do: they draw disparate entities or items together into a unified pattern or system that aligns sufficiently with reality as to provide fruitful meaning. Ultimately, religion, in both its broad common sense and narrow ritualistic form, involves making meaning from material to give order, pattern, and purpose to one’s life. And let’s be fair once again: the non-religious have belief systems making meaning from material, from which they draw purpose in their lives, just as the traditionally religious do. You can make a religion of scientific materialism, for instance, with its litanies, epiphanies, blasphemies, beliefs, and rituals, just as much as you can of Judaism or Christianity. You can likewise make a religion out of technology. Misguided souls are right now giving artificial intelligence divine authority for the meaning of life and their purpose in life, including how to act that purpose out. Choose your religion carefully, or it may choose you.
Spirituality
You’ll also hear the terms faith, belief, and religion used synonymously, or nearly so, with spirituality. You might hear someone described as very spiritual, which could mean very devoted to a traditional religion and its practices, disciplines, and rituals. Yet you might also hear someone describe themself as spiritual but not religious. Spirituality can thus bear a different connotation from religion, belief, and faith. That distinction can be hard to discern and define, though. Spiritual in that sense may simply mean not practicing a traditional religious faith but nonetheless engaging in ritualistic practices around some clearly or unclearly defined belief in the invisible or unseen. Beliefs and practices involving crystals and their vortex energies, for instance, can be relatively clear and sufficiently defined for adherents to recognize and share. Followers of those beliefs and practices might call themselves spiritual but not religious, although the terms may be sufficiently loose for alternative usages. Some Christians, for instance, would be perfectly comfortable describing themselves as highly spiritual but not necessarily religious. Show sensitivity as to how you others deploy these terms, especially when referring to another’s beliefs, rituals, and practices.
Rituals
Consider the additional term ritual as having both traditionally religious and non-religious common meanings. We all have rituals, from how we get up, clean ourselves up, and get dressed in the morning, right through the day to how we clean ourselves up, get undressed, and go to bed at night. Greeting others, for instance, is highly ritualistic, right down to the expected approach, posture, demeanor, communication, and response. Alter that ritual even slightly, and the person whom you greet may stop you, inquire of you, grow annoyed, or take offense. We ritualize everything simply to navigate with less energy spent in considered thought. We have limited attention to allocate. Processing situations and stimuli takes tremendous mental energy. The more we can navigate by ritual, on auto-pilot, the more attention and energy we have for new situations needing our attention. We undertake some rituals, though, not so much to navigate as to realign. The ritual of saluting your superior officer may be inefficient but wisely affirms the necessary hierarchy. The ritual of pledging allegiance reminds one of the allegiance on which civil society depends. The same is true for religious rituals: they remind one of the invisible structures and hierarchies with which we do our best by aligning. If the world had an exquisite hidden order that rewarded you immensely by following it, wouldn’t you want a ritual to follow to promote your alignment?
Reflection
In what or who do you place your greatest faith? On what belief would you or do you stake your life? What actions do you regularly take that demonstrate your faith? How much faith would you say that you have? Can you recall an instance when you failed to exhibit the necessary faith, and it cost you something? In that instance, what circumstance or belief discouraged your faith? Do you think of yourself as religious? Would someone else who knows you well describe you as religious? Do you know your purpose in the world? What beliefs undergird your sense of purpose? Would you prefer to think of yourself as spiritual rather than religious? If so, why? Do you follow any rituals that, rather than having practical effect, instead affirm your commitment, loyalty, values, or beliefs? If so, what are they? Do you show your love for and commitment to your wife or children, for instance, through any ritual that has little or no practical but heavy symbolic effect?
Key Points
Faith is confidence in following intelligible unseen structures.
We all act out of faith, aligning our actions with expectations.
Greater faith involves more confidence in what we cannot observe.
Lack of faith can discourage acting consistent with real possibilities.
Faith involves choice, volition, and will, influenced by circumstances.
Faith requires belief in both the existence and benefit of the unseen.
Religion is a belief system unifying things into meaning and purpose.
Spirituality can refer to a traditional or non-traditional belief system.
We all follow rituals to navigate, while religious rituals affirm beliefs.