Faith and Accountability

In When God Talks Back, TM Luhrmann describes her study of American "charismatic" evangelical groups. She spent several years embedded as an anthropologist in a few of these communities, and gives a thorough and generally sympathetic view of them in the book. Her sympathy, such as it is, stems not so much from shared beliefs, but from her scrupulous efforts at scholarly neutrality -- a product, as she reminds us time and again, of her training as an anthropologist.

Over the course of my own life, I have become ever more firmly atheist as I think more carefully about the meaning of a belief in God in the sense usually meant by "religion." My work as an undergraduate focused in part on the nature of religious belief (specifically in early Mormons) and I am not fool enough to claim any certainty on the question of what God is or is not. Religious faith, like all matters of conscience, can not be disputed objectively, and therefore all serious systems of belief must be afforded a high degree of respect and deference. God does not talk to me, and I don't honestly believe that he talks to anybody (not the least because I don't think anything as large as God could be gender-specific) but I am more than willing to listen to people who say they can converse with the deity. I am very much interested in what they mean by the claim and what consequence they think it has.

And therein lies the rub. Luhrmann tells several stories about congregants who abdicate all responsibility for the consequences for their beliefs. Near the end of the book she offers an account of an exchange between several women in a prayer group. One woman says her daughter refused to wear "floaties" while swimming because "if I had gone down to the bottom of the pool God would have whispered in your heart and told you I was down there." [p.331] The mother and some her friends then laugh, and one even says "I would have said 'Honey, I know this God. You wear those floaties.'" But one member of the group was offended and suggested "we all ought to believe in God like that little girl." In another story a woman refuses to move out of an apartment she can't afford or take a job she does not like because she believes God wants her to be entirely dependent on him. In other words, God is a sadistic enabler.

That kind of stuff bothers me because it leads to irresponsible behavior. Believe what you want, but don't think that it absolves you of all accountability in my eyes or in anyone else's. Only the self-involved and self-indulgent can find a way to justify a staunch faith in God's desire to let them off the hook. Even Muhammad said "trust in God and tether your camel." And if the true believer goes to Congress and argues that we should not worry about climate change because God will take care of it and/or we ant the apocalypse, then his self-involved faith interferes with my efforts to clean up a mess.