What Story Do You Live By?

On the stories that make sense of life, the communities that share them, and the difference between How and Why questions.

Jun 29, 2024

Now that I’ve been showing my face in church for six months, and I’ve begun tentatively mentioning that fact in mixed company, I’ve been asked the same question over and over again. Are you a Christian? Not a wildly inappropriate thing to ask in the circumstances, and yet every time I hear it, I go into cognitive panic mode.

I keep reaching for something both informative and entertaining to say, a witty quip, perhaps, that alludes to the cards in my hand without having to place them face up on the table. The problem is that I’m not even sure what cards I’m holding, religiously speaking, so I invariably say something opaque and confusing rather than suggestive of an answer or a working brain.

I usually stumble over some abortive efforts at discussing the nature of belief, then offer a handful of half-formed sentiments about “cultural Christianity” versus “traditional faith”. Finally, I land on what seems to be the least untrue answer I can currently give — “no” — or I borrow from the vernacular of modern dating and say, “It’s complicated.”

Sometimes, though, the question is somewhat broader: Are you religious? This is a question that I intuitively feel more comfortable around. I always say “yes” to that one, and sometimes, if I’m feeling a little cocky, I’ll say that we’re all religious in various ways. Then I’ll add, a little too glibly, “But the devil — or God — is in the details.”

That phrase finally caught up to me last Sunday, when I was offering this canned answer to a genuinely curious Christian, and she invited me to spell out some of those details. In that moment, the fuel tank of my stock answer emptied out. I had to start seriously working through what I mean by a word like “religious”.

A disclaimer before we go any further: I’m not interested in defining religion in some empirical sense. I’m attempting to describe an approach to religion that make sense to me. This is more a study of my tastes and prejudices than an academic study of facts. This isn’t an argument to persuade the unconvinced, but an attempt to make some sense of experiences a great number of us have had. You will recognise something here or you won’t, that’s all.

An Answer to Why Questions

The relationship between science and religion has been soaked in blood and ink, and the results of those literal and textual battles has been, at different times, to reconcile the two or depose one with the other. There’s no way I can settle that debate here, but I can highlight one way of understanding the dynamics between faith and reason that appeals to me. “Science,” Jonathan Sacks once wrote, “takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”

In other words: science shows us how, religion tells us why.

Of course, many simply dismiss this with the philosophically naïve hand-wave that Richard Dawkins offers in The God Delusion, where he writes:

“What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.”

What Dawkins overlooks in his eloquent obtuseness is that questions of human meaning – why am I here? what does it all mean? how should I live? – are not deserving of serious attention merely because those questions can be phrased “in a grammatically correct English sentence”. Questions of this kind deserve our attention because they continually, across times and places and cultures, demand our attention. It’s not that we choose to ask questions about meaning out of boredom or to give theologians something to do; it’s that we are haunted by these questions. They chase us out of our boredom, hound us in our darkest times, provoke us when we’re comfortable, and insist on themselves.

Given that we can’t escape the question of what our lives mean, or could mean, or should mean, what might the answers look like? I would suggest that whatever their particulars – whether the answer you offer is scientific or theological, poetic or prosaic – they always come nested in a story. Stories are our answers to why questions, because stories take the facts of things and bind them together. A story “puts things together to see what they mean”.

This is why I view science as a methodology and religion as a set of narratives. To be religious, in my sense of it, is to share a story with a community about the ontology and teleology of humans – who we are and why we’re here. To say you’re not religious, then, is to claim you have no interest in such questions. And I find that hard to believe.

We’re All Storytellers

Even those who don’t consider themselves religious tell a story about who they are and the world they live in. They often attempt to build that story out of science, and they market this narrative as belonging in the non-fiction section of the cultural bookshop. In its simplest rendition, their story goes: I am a meat-puppet whose strings are pulled by the deterministic laws of the material universe, and there’s no inherent value in that universe, so I create my own meaning.

There’s an old joke about a priest who goes into a holy space and bows down, chanting, “I am dust, and I am nothing.” A rabbi then comes along and says, “I am dust, and I am nothing.” Then an imam comes in and says the same. Finally, a caretaker comes in to clean, but first he says, “I am dust, and I am nothing.” The three religious leaders look at the man, then say to each other, “Who the hell does he think he is, saying he’s nothing?”

Today’s atheists remind me of that joke. They are the non-religious caretaker insisting on their own nothingness, that they are made of dust, yet speaking of it in a way that makes it sacred. They fail to see that this isn’t so different from the religious story. In the deepest, most nourishing forms of religious narratives, humans must face down the reality of their own limited nature, of their lowly origins, and reach up to what they might become. The atheist tells a story about humans as mere animals that can — indeed must — transcend their animal nature, to create meaning in a meaningless universe.

There are often these interesting overlaps in religious stories, although my conception of religion might be less universalist than I initially believed, because the story I live by has a particularly Christian prose style. I’ll leave it to those who speak the language of Islam, Jainism, or any other world faith to tell their version of the religious narrative.

In the story as I know it, there’s a battle between good and evil that’s played out in the cosmos and within each person. There’s failure, and redemption, and the sacrifice required to be made new. There’s radical forgiveness. There’s charity and love. And there are the parables, fictions, myths, and histories-as-narratives that combine all of these things into a grand story that’s told and retold by each generation, passed down as a form of membership in the community that keeps this story alive.

If you’d like something a little more organised, here’s Aldous Huxley’s rendition of perennialism, which does a good job of expressing the core of the religious story that speaks most forcefully to me:

“The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground — the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to “Die to self” and so make room, as it were, for God.”

And here’s how it’s told with more specificity and a decidedly more Christian slant (as recounted by Roger Scruton in Our Church):

“The religious life is one lived in the full consciousness of judgement, and it requires a constant search for absolution — for the cleansing of the soul that comes when the fault is atoned for and forgiven. We can most easily accomplish this if we recognize that the world is a gift and our life a part of that gift. We are called upon to give thanks and the being whom we thank is the one who also grants absolution, since our faults are forms of ingratitude, failures of love. That is the meaning of the two commandments that Christ put above all others and on which hang all the law and the prophets.”

This is also why Paul tells the Colossians that love is above all other virtues and “binds them all together in perfect unity”. The shortest version I could tell of the religious story I live by is that it’s a story of love.

A Sidebar on Truth

Too often, the only response to such metaphysically bold and potentially life-changing stories is the impoverished demand made by credulity to label them as “true” or “false”. As John Betjeman asks of the Christian redemption story, “And is it true? And is it true, / This most tremendous tale of all”?

Whole books could be written on the subject of truth and religion and so-called “religious truth”. I won’t spend much time on it here, because in some sense I resent the question. It seems as beside the point as asking whether Frankenstein is true. If you want to know whether a man in the nineteenth century gave life to a creature stitched together out of corpses, you’re reading it wrong. However, religion — even in its fuzziest sense as an extended metaphor — has some relation to truth. Most forms of religion make explicit claims about physics and biology (and usually get them wrong). What about religion when seen as a story?

If your story demands you live as if known scientific truths are in fact false — if you must deny evolution or insist that homeopathic tinctures have the ability to heal (or, really, to do anything) — then that story won’t be sustainable nor sustaining. We’re finite creatures in a physical universe predicated on various laws; denial of the rules of existence in favour of a fanciful story can lead us into trouble. Your preference for a belief in your ability to fly will take you only as far as the fall is long, before reality — in the form of gravity and a sudden stop — undoes your storytelling.

Not to mention: this violates the proposed boundary between science and religion, the latter of which isn’t supposed to give us the “how” of things. It’s supposed to show us the “why”.

Sebastian Junger’s latest book, In My Time of Dying, describes how he came breathtakingly close to death and how that made him rethink the idea of an afterlife. In the book, he offers a wonderful example of a story that isn’t demonstrably true, but doesn’t violate anything that is. Junger writes:

“My father was a devoted rationalist who nevertheless believed that humans have souls, and that each soul briefly exists as its own entity, like a wave on the ocean. Souls are made of something we don’t understand yet, he said, and waves are just pulses of energy moving through a medium. My father believed that when we die, our souls are subsumed back into the vast soulmatter of the universe like waves subsumed back into the sea. He didn’t believe in anything as simpleminded as heaven or as extravagant as reincarnation, but he also never looked up at the stars because he said he found the immensity overwhelming.”

This is as unprovable (presently) as it is beautiful, and as a story it doesn’t ask you to deny anything we know about the facts of reality. The “soulmatter of the universe” isn’t a measurable quantity of some detectable element; it’s a description of a dimension of human experience that our species wouldn’t be our species without. Have I just made an objective claim, verifiable (or refutable) by the scientific method? Is this a claim about biology? Perhaps, if you’re literal-minded enough to take it that way. No, this is something much deeper than data. It’s a story that makes sense of how we experience the data, how we live our lives.

The Attachments By Which We Live

I mentioned earlier a book by Roger Scruton called Our Church, which describes the public history of the Anglican church and Scruton’s personal relationship with it. Our Church is an expansive stroll through culture in the company of a voracious mind. It did much to fill some very large and lamentable gaps in my knowledge of a church so integral to the psyche of the country I call home. It also helped me better define my own understanding of what it is to be religious. One of Scruton’s key insights is that faith sits at the centre of community and community at the centre of faith.

Here’s Scruton taking his first swings at the intellectual brush to clear a path at the start of Our Church:

“Religion is not simply a matter of believing a few abstract metaphysical propositions that stand shaking and vulnerable before the advance of modern science. Religion is a way of life, involving customs and ceremonies that validate what matters to us, and which reinforce the attachments by which we live.”

That’s my emphasis, highlighting what struck me so forcefully while reading the book. Scruton then adds:

“[Religion] is both a faith and a form of membership, in which the destiny of the individual is bound up with that of a community.”

It’s this sense of community that distinguishes a religious story from the life philosophy of an individual, that separates shared values from solipsism. Christopher Hitchens used to mock churchgoers by saying that atheists don’t have to remind themselves every Sunday what they’re supposed to believe. But we who attend church, from the devout around me to the dilettante that I am, are there not to remind ourselves of the story, but to re-enact it and understand it anew. The rehearsal is as much a part of it as the retelling, because it’s the shared rituals and ceremonies that give flesh to the words of the story.

That perpetual re-enactment of the religious narrative fails as a one-man show. It requires a full cast of faithful devotees offering themselves up to the Divine author of their story and to each other. Among God’s first words in Genesis are, “It is not good for man to be alone.” In Hebrews, we’re encouraged to “consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another”. The religious story has a prescriptive element; it’s not only a description of things as they are, but of how things should be. The story we tell in my community is about relation – how we relate to the Divine and how we relate to each other.

Granted, many of the other people at church understand the story very differently to the way I read and live it. There’s that old joke about there being as many gods as there are believers. It’s an interesting philosophical question about how far apart two views of God have to be to constitute belief in separate entities. Does a Christian who believes in a god who created life six thousand years ago believe in the same god as a Christian who believes he did it millions of years ago via evolution? Do they believe in the same god if one believes in the torment awaiting all sinners and the other is a universalist with no conception of Hell? I don’t know, but functionally speaking, they’re both Christians.

So, back to the question I’m sometimes asked these days: Are you a Christian? Given what most people mean by that most of the time, my answer is: Probably not. If being a Christian requires belief in certain metaphysical and historical claims like the literal resurrection of a Jewish carpenter in the middle east, then I’m definitely not a Christian. (Although I consider it an open question whether religious faith is better understood as a set of beliefs or a set of practices.)

All that said, I do live by a story that makes meaning out of the facts of things, that both describes the world and prescribes my behaviour in it, and that I share with a community. In my vocabulary, that makes me religious – it’s a religious story.