Why I still believe in God.

A journey away from faith, and back again

Ten years ago I was sitting in a rainy car park in Cornwall, the rough sea only visible between strokes of the windscreen wipers, the soft notes of a Sigur Ros song playing and I was crying. Sometimes crying feels beautiful, you feel sadness in a way that you have not been able to and in doing so, release it. I was crying because I was sitting in a car park where we came on holiday as kids, a big group of our family, my parents and brother, my uncles and aunts and my cousins. They were Christian family holidays, we had bible studies and meetings and sung hymns and choruses, and usually everyone there was a Christian. I was overcome by the sadness of being there again with my family who are all Christians, happy and purposeful, while I was long adrift from church life, lost and doubtful. But I also felt the goodness and kindness of Christian community, there in that beautiful place and I longed for it, wished I could have had it as easily as others, fitted into church as contentedly. But I didn’t, I like so many of my generation who grew up in church found myself wandering in a desert of uncertainty, never fully freed of the feeling of being an alien to the world and yet unable to embrace the church culture I grew up in.

Try to ask the question of God in our moment and you will be stuck between the apparently irrational dogmas of religion and the nihilistic individualism of the secular milieu. Any claim of belief feels like an admittance of ignorance, a narrowing of knowledge into the structures of a dogma without sufficient evidence or justification. Truth is either relative or unattainable. Science has told us enough to be able to kick out a few cornerstones, but not enough to save us. It seems we must shoulder the meaninglessness of an eternity bearing down upon us. I am staggered when I read news articles about the mental health epidemic of our culture as if it is somehow surprising. We have no meaning. Or in the words of Brian Cox, ‘meaning is local’. In other words, we make it up, or find it in temporary things that matter for a bit, then don’t.

As a child of the church, addressing its dogma is difficult. Your approach feels barred by a sheath of literalism. Pull at a thread and the whole thing collapses. You ask yourself how much you have to believe to really say you believe it and find the whole thing undermined by the simple act of disbelief in some small part. I find the literalism of Noah’s ark, or God sending a bear to kill a bunch of kids for laughing at Elijah for being bald or God and the devil making bets about how long they can torture Job before he gives in, to be absurd. But I find the message and person of Jesus compelling, the narrative sweep and mesmerising authority of the prophetic tradition to be stunning, the bible to be full of sublime beauty, and the emergence of moral goodness and values on which we have constructed our societies from the christian tradition to be undeniable.

Christians likewise have the same problem. They cannot deny literalistic readings because to do so would be to undermine the idea of inherency, and that would undermine the authority of scripture, and something has to maintain and unify the church. Besides, who decides which bits are in and which are out? The fear is a kind of squirming Rob Bell style watery liberalism that refuses to blow the horn of truth for fear that it might affect your book sales. Unsurprisingly while people like Rob Bell are gaining some following from disillusioned church goers, church attendance in the US and in the UK is in decline.

Certain churches are subverting the trend of dying church attendance. Contemporary Christian worship groups like Hillsong or Bethel music have seen growing numbers of attendance in churches and on tours and huge amounts of views and plays on youtube and Spotify. Their services look like music festivals, their worship leaders like they are dressed for Instagram selfies. While I have always been skeptical about these kinds of expressions of a faith that should always have the mud and grind of real life as its primacy, these services are important. It seems as humans we have a deep capacity for a kind of divine experience exploited by these events. What is happening here in worship sessions is the momentary alignment of selfhood and community, moral goodness, ultimate meaning and ecstatic transcendence. The result is a moment that many consider to be the most meaningful in their lives. Recent experiments with psychedelic drugs as a possible treatment for depression or addiction show us our deep need for an experience of universal love and meaning. It seems as much as we might be told that meaning is local, we seem to have the capacity and the need to make it universal. If you listen to the testimony of someone converted at a worship event, or indeed in any church, you get the sense of the need for the narratives of our lives to be purposeful, meaningful. We sense we are pilgrims, and we want things to matter now and to matter forever. The alignment experienced in ecstatic christian worship seems to produce a kind of mountaintop moment, where the sense of uplift produced by the universal and community expression of infinite goodness allows you to see the journey of your life and the journey of the entire of humanity leading up a teleological Jacob’s ladder of time into deliverance.

But life is mundane and these experiences rarely last. They are criticised by more conservative churches for their shallowness and hedonistic emptiness. Churches that emphasis worship culture, while they may profess garden variety christian beliefs, often do not preach directly from the bible and are full of suspect beliefs and practices (Bethel church once claimed the miracle of gold dust falling at a service which some attendees noted was bog standard stripper glitter being pumped through the air conditioning). They fail to make the distinction between ecstatic expression and liturgy. Many of their conversions can be false and produce a hardening that will never allow people to accept christian doctrines again. As important as ecstatic experiences in religion are, they cannot hold it together without the community rituals that make universal love a reality in the difficulties of our everyday existence.

Many churches have small groups that meet in peoples homes, they often drink tea, read the bible and pray for each other. Nothing that I have ever encountered outside the church has reproduced this setting of a meeting of people across demographics who gather with a sense of goodness and of care. An old lady, a married couple in their forties, and single men in their twenties, might all sit around someone’s lounge and pray for the small problems in each others lives. And if you pray you think, and you care. You are raising each others problems to an ultimate goodness and sharing each others difficulties. You could say that nothing is here that couldn’t exist outside the church, but the question is, why doesn’t it? Why have we instead developed a materialistic individualism obsessed with the narcissism and voyeurism of social media than a community of cross-societal care? Dare I suggest that we need an ultimate moral imperative, a meaning?

Small practices matter in our lives. When I think of prayer I think of an old Welsh couple who my Mum knew when she was young, who visited occasionally when we were children. They always asked about my life and told me they prayed for me. I thought nothing of it then, but looking back on it as an adult I have always been amazed by the idea that they sat by their bedside and genuinely felt a sense of care for children they rarely saw, because of a sense of care they felt for my Mother during a difficult time of her life. I remember their warmth, and I find it hard to believe that these things do not go hand in hand. How many young people spend their evenings by the cold light of computer screens, watching porn or obsessing over social media. I think of that welsh couple, knelt by their bedside raising the spirits of others to an ultimate goodness that listens, that knows and that cares. Our rituals shape us into who we are and form our social fabric. Maybe our shallowness and selfishness, or goodness and kindness, is partly decided in our rituals when no one is looking. Jesus said when we pray we should go in our rooms and close the doors. Contrary to the social media narrative, where what matters is what other people see, it matters what you do when no one is looking. We grow out of the compost of our small actions because God cares and ordains them.

Existence itself is absurd. There I was in a car park in tears, because everything I was as a child and everything I am as an adult meets in that place, even now. We find ourselves at home in a universe that could not be any other way. Our brains sign a meaning out of the white noise of its signal, and they hallucinate its reality into being from the murky waters of our brains. We watch time unfold, passengers, tourists. In our moment of society we have decided to throw our arms in the air and say that truth is probably, at best, relative. Make your own meaning. Materialism is a heuristic that has enabled unimaginable technological and scientific developments, but it is without a doubt insufficient to raise our consciousness from it’s indifferent fabric. Even our experience has the quality of revelation. We still order our society around the belief that every individual has a kind of divine significance and agency, even though we have forgotten where we learnt this. We still believe in abstract values like love and justice, as beaten, battered and undefined as they have become. These values seem to make reference to an ultimate value, a value of values, a goodness from which we derive all goodness. As a Christian, I believe this is God. I know goodness because I have been shown it, taught it, and experienced it in the faulty, complicated and imperfect vessel of my christian heritage, and I hope this is what I may in some sense pass on to someone else. In that car by the sea, in the summer rain, and here, now, and in England, I am a child of God.

I don’t know where we as Christians go from here. Contemporary worship culture may go some way to reclaiming disillusioned and doubting young people back to church, but since they cannot fully affirm it’s doctrines or teach with sufficient clarity, it will never have the gravity to hold people through the course of life with all of it’s temptations to doubt and indifference. The church has to address the relationship of revelation and literalism, reaffirm it’s vital truths and find a way to proclaim the goodness of God in a way that is both ecstatic and serious, that revalorises both the necessity of the joyful celebration of community and the rugged and dark vision of the pilgrims path, through which we must care and help each other, knowing that we are fallen, and that so much of the Christian life we must face the indifference and hatred of people towards the God who made them and set his love upon them. But we trudge to the altar rejoicing, knowing, trusting and believing that in the end, God is good. And in our uncertain and fearful culture, we need that goodness and meaning as much as ever.