why religion matters
We can’t compare faith flatly to reason and declare it intellectually
inferior. Its territory is the drama of human life, where art is more
precise than science....
by Krista Tippett
Some say that religion is the cause of our worst divisions, and a threat to democracy and
civilization. The truth is more broadly and deeply rooted in the human psyche and spirit.
The great religious traditions have survived across millennia because they express
insights that human beings have repeatedly found to be true. But they are containers for
those insights—fashioned and carried forward by human beings, and therefore prone to
every passion and frailty of the human condition. Religions become entangled with
human identity, and there is nothing more intimate and volatile than that. Our sacred
traditions should help us live more thoughtfully, generously, and hopefully with the
tensions of our age. But to grasp that, we must look anew at the very nature of faith.
I reject the kind of sweeping prognostication that has become popular in recent years and
fueled fear and paranoia: doomsday scenarios of impeding theocracy, phrases like a
“clash of civilizations.” I’m drawn to what I call “the vast middle” between the poles of
competing religious certainties that have hijacked our cultural discourse. In the vast
middle, faith is as much about questions as it is about answers. It is possible to be a
believer and a listener at the same time, to be both fervent and searching, to honor the
truth of one’s own convictions and the mystery of the convictions of others. The context
of most religious virtue is relationship—practical love in families and communities, and
care for the suffering and the stranger beyond the bounds of one’s own identity. These
qualities of religion should enlarge, not narrow, our public conversation about all of the
important issues before us. They should reframe it.
I was born on the night John F. Kennedy was elected president. So I arrived more or less
with the ’60s, but too late to experience the underlying hope and whimsy of the times. I
came of age to the unraveling of dreams. My earliest public memories, the defining
public events of my childhood, are of violence and tragedy attached to admirable faces:
John and Robert Kennedy; Martin Luther King, Jr.; young men coming home bloody and
broken from Vietnam. I grew up with a strong but deeply conflicted sense of politics as
the primary arena of human action—of social power and of human frailty, of light and
dark secularized yet of biblical proportions.
In those years Western intellectuals were foretelling and urging the end of religion. As
societies grew more technologically advanced and plural, they argued, religion would
simply retreat to the private sphere. Perhaps it would disappear altogether. In 1965
Harvard University’s Harvey Cox published his bestseller The Secular City praising the
joys of post-religious culture. On April 8, 1966 Time magazine asked on its cover, “Is
God Dead?”
For decades religion was not treated seriously by those running governments, writing
history, driving industry, and defining the issues. Religion, as Boston University
sociologist Peter Berger muses, became something “that was done in private between
consenting adults.”
Spiritually, religiously, I was a child of my time. I grew up in Oklahoma, the
granddaughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. Through my grandfather I experienced the
drama of faith, but my parents had turned their backs on his stern rules for a fallen
creation. We went to church on Sunday. Monday through Friday I was raised to win, to
perfect myself, and to do so in the American way of accomplishment and accumulation.
I believed then that all of the important and interesting problems in the world were
political, and all of the solutions too. And for a while I threw myself body, mind, and
spirit at this conviction.
But I changed my mind. There are places in human experience that politics can not
analyze or address, and they are among our raw, essential, heartbreaking, and life-giving
realities.
In the early 1990s I studied theology to learn whether I could reconcile religious faith
with my intelligence and world experience, and whether faith could illuminate life in all
its complexity and passion and frailty. I decided that it can. I have found a vast and vivid
landscape of others who share this discovery.
The spiritual energy of our time, as I’ve come to understand it, is not a rejection of the
rational disciplines by which we’ve ordered our common life for many decades—law,
politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited
scope. They can’t ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. We can construct
factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code, but they
don’t begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters
in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of
questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation
across generations about them.
In this handful of years since I began to think and speak about faith in a new way, the
world has realigned itself once again. Religion has moved from the sidelines to the center
of world affairs and American life. Western pundits, policymakers, and citizens have
awakened collectively to the fact that religion never went away. Indeed, it remains a force
that animates lives and nations and history—for better or for worse. Religious identities
and spiritually fueled passions are shaping this post-Cold War century as ideologies
defined the last. And nothing could be more unrealistic—or more dangerous—than the
prescription that reasonable people should abandon religion for its sins. For every shrill
and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of
God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see
and hear them, as well.
I’ve come to understand religious texts and traditions as keepers of truth more
openhearted and realistic than many of the arguments against them and the practices in
their orbit. We have to think about truth and knowledge itself differently—the insights
and edges of words and ideas, the richness of their forms—to understand the nature of
religion and the work of theology, the human attempt to pin God, however fleetingly,
down to earth. In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes
from. The language of the human heart is poetry. Music is a language of the spirit. The
métier of religious ideas is parable, verse, and story. All of our names for God are
metaphor. Our sacred texts burn with that knowledge and dare us to use all of our
faculties of intelligence and experience and creativity. But we forget this: our fact- and
argument-obsessed culture is deaf to it, blind to it.
“Our theology,” says British author Karen Armstrong, “should be like poetry…. A poet
spends a great deal of time listening to his unconscious, and slowly calling up a poem
word by word, phrase by phrase, until something beautiful is brought forth into the world
that changes people’s perceptions….” This is why we can’t compare faith flatly to reason
and declare it intellectually inferior. Its territory is the drama of human life, where art is
more precise than science, where ideas are lived and breathed. Our minds can be engaged
in this realm as seriously as in the construction of argument or logic, but in a different
way. Life and art both test the limits and landscape of argument and logic. We apprehend
religious mystery and truth in words and as often, perhaps, beyond them: in the presence
of beauty, in acts of kindness, and in silence. N
Krista Tippett is the host of American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith. This article is
from Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett, © 2007 by Krista Tippett. Used by permission
of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
“The Rainbow” by Arkhip Ivanovich Kuinji