Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is

By Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens

A deeper look at how people individually and collectively form religious beliefs—and what that means for faith in an increasingly secular culture.

Secularism is increasingly a fact of life in Western society. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that faith is harder than it has been before. Even in the past when organized religion enjoyed more widespread cultural acceptance, there were still obstacles to true belief. Today, the obstacles are different, but faith is still viable. 

Acclaimed author Terryl Givens and his son, Nathaniel Givens, combine their respective areas of expertise to offer a fresh take on religious belief through the lens of contemporary research on psychology, cognition, and human nature. They also address two of faith’s foremost modern-day antagonists: rationalism, the myth that humans can or should make the majority of their choices based on logical thought, and scientism, the myth that science is the only reliable means of discovering truth. After reckoning with the surprising fact that people often don’t even understand their own beliefs and are influenced in ways they seldom perceive, the authors go on to describe genuine faith as an act of will—an effortful response to the deepest yearnings of the mind and heart—that engenders moral responsibility, the ability to embrace uncertainty, the motivation and means to relate to others, and the capacity to apprehend reality through nonrational means. 

Written for truth seekers who may or may not belong to religious communities, Into the Headwinds is less a work of apologetics than an inquiry into the role that faith can and does still play in a society where participation in institutional religion is declining precipitously. Terryl and Nathaniel Givens propose that to reclaim the power of genuine faith we need to first acknowledge the reality that religious belief is hard. It always has been, and it always will be. But perhaps, instead of a hindrance, that is its most important aspect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781467465496

Terryl Givens

Terryl Givens is a Neal L. Maxwell Senior Fellow at Brigham Young University. He formerly held the University of Richmond's Jabez A. Bostwick Chair of English, where he was professor of literature and religion. He is the author and coauthor of numerous books, including All Things New, The God Who Weeps, and The Crucible of Doubt.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Secularism Is Not the Problem

As we witness the decline of religious commitment it is easy to conclude that belief is just harder in the modern world. In this chapter, we show that this is a false diagnosis. Faith in the miraculous workings of God has never been as easy as our simplistic accounts would have it. Secularism alone is not the headwind we face.

According to popular wisdom, this modern and secular age is particularly hard on religious belief. As Charles Taylor points out, ours is the first era in which belief is one option among many: disbelief, indifference, agnosticism, or atheism.¹ If you had lived centuries ago in the West, everyone around you would have been, in Robinson Jeffers’s words, taking the stars and the gods for granted.² There is an important sense in which this characterization can read as more caricature than truth.³ When early Christians taught that Jesus had risen from the dead after being crucified, the claim was not met with gullible shrugs by superstitious rubes who thought anything was possible. Far from it. People living in ancient times had more frequent and more intimate experience with death than we do. The idea that someone who had been dead and laid to rest for three days could rise up in a renewed body was considered unbelievable and ridiculous, even among Jesus’s own disciples. In the broader pagan world, the claim made Christians the object of widespread ridicule.

At the same time, it is demonstrably true that today more and more people, especially in the modernized West, find organized religion to be superfluous, irrelevant, unappealing, and slightly (or majorly) absurd. This trend even has a name: the Rise of the Nones, where none refers to those who answer none of the above in religious affiliation surveys. If nearly everyone believed in God in the past and now fewer and fewer do, isn’t it clear that something about modernity is hostile to religious belief? This is the basic idea behind the secularization hypothesis, a broad category of theories first propounded in the early twentieth century by famous thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim.

Today, the secularization hypothesis has spread into the popular consciousness, so that many people accept it in broad outline even if they don’t know the term. The theory goes something like this: a long time ago, before the Age of Enlightenment, there was no such thing as science. Without the practice of rigorously testing theories against evidence, people were free to employ supernaturalism to explain a whole range of mysterious phenomena from lightning to eclipses to the plague. After all, if you don’t test your ideas against evidence, then one explanation is as good as any other.

Not only did the dearth of science make supernaturalist explanations easier to accept, but the harshness of life before science also made such explanations comforting.

Life before the Age of Reason may indeed have been largely solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,⁴ in the characterization of Thomas Hobbes. Without modern agriculture and medicine, disease and starvation were rampant. The vast majority of people had to spend their lives in difficult subsistence farming just to keep hunger at bay. A small elite ruled over the farmers with tyrannical power. Even this privileged minority lived in conditions we would regard as squalid, since the richest kings didn’t have running hot water or refrigeration, let alone electric lights and air conditioning. In this Malthusian landscape, individual and collective acts of violence compounded natural suffering far beyond contemporary experience.

For those living lives of unremitting hardship, religion offered an appealing form of consolation: suffering was given meaning, and a distant future promised better days and heavenly rewards. According to this theory, religion was the collection of stories that people adopted to make life tolerable.

In addition to explaining why religion was ubiquitous in the preindustrial West, the popular version of the secularization hypothesis seems to explain why religion is no longer as prevalent today. After all, life has changed remarkably since those dark, blighted days—and for the better. This is why a prominent intellectual like Steven Pinker can aver that improved social and economic conditions since the Enlightenment is the best argument going for retiring religious paradigms.⁵

With the advent of science, people developed more sophisticated tools for evaluating beliefs. At the same time, technological progress dramatically improved standards of living. From aspirin to anesthesia to the eight-hour workday, pain and drudgery became less and less the norm. It would appear to be no coincidence that religion’s decline has been steepest where education has displaced ignorance, and where health and plenty have displaced suffering and want—in the first-world nations of the West. The core premise—that religion flourishes as a salve to the suffering and blighted but is superfluous to the rich and informed—appears borne out.

So far, so good. But the secularization hypothesis has run into problems in recent years. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to apply universally. Some global regions—such as sub-Saharan Africa and China—are only now modernizing rapidly; in those areas religion is not declining, but is advancing at a rapid pace. If a primary draw of religion is its opiate effect on the suffering, those trends don’t make sense. And a moment’s reflection, in any case, should tell us that religion is not about inventing happy myths to make our lives more palatable. The reality is that many monotheistic religions, the focus of our present book, make life more challenging, not less. After all, Christianity requires us to love our enemies, to seek perfection, to live by strict moral codes, and to give up everything—including our time, our resources, and even our lives. The challenge of Christianity, as with all moral systems, is to provoke us to bridge the enormous distance between what we are now and what we sense we can—and should—be. That is not an easy or pleasant journey to make. Christianity promises a lot, but it also asks a lot in return.

The defining and most conspicuous attributes of early Christianity—as judged by its non-Christian contemporaries—were strict regulation of sexual behavior for both sexes and a total disregard for class distinctions. In contrast, most of the religions of that time ignored or even condoned and endorsed sexual promiscuity (at least for men) and rigid social hierarchy. These traditions asked little of their adherents, relative to the austere demands of Christianity, since they conformed to human appetites and cultural norms.

Rigorous religious demands are alive and well in the more thriving religious traditions in the world. Perhaps more perplexing for the secularization hypothesis, the so-called nones are leaving organized religion behind, but they are not leaving spirituality behind. The secularization hypothesis treats all spiritual and supernatural beliefs as more or less interchangeable. But while the nones are leaving the pews empty, they do not seem to be rejecting the less institutional accoutrements of religion: reverence for nature, mindfulness, fellow feeling—even a vigorous appetite for an immanent, if not a transcendent, Sacred. Churches are in decline, but those identifying as spiritual are not.

If the secularization hypothesis doesn’t fit contemporary experience on a closer inspection, it fares just as badly in historical context. As we remarked at the outset, core Christian claims met with entrenched skepticism even among early disciples; seeds of belief in the resurrection took initial root only in the women of the movement, and who was going to take them seriously? The apostles did not. He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it (Mark 16:9–11).

We should not be surprised, therefore, that some of the earliest critics of Christianity pointed out its raw implausibility; apparently familiar with the resurrection narrative, Celsus asked, And who beheld this? A half-frantic woman, as you state, and some other one, perhaps, of those who were engaged in the same system of delusion.⁶ No wonder that one of the oldest of all depictions of Jesus Christ is the Alexamenos graffito, a mocking depiction of Christians worshiping Jesus Christ on the cross, who is depicted with the head of a donkey. Christ crucified [was] foolishness to Gentiles, observed Paul (1 Cor. 1:23).

Clearly, we need to reconsider a fundamental inference that we draw from the secularization hypothesis. The Enlightenment did not substantially alter the way average humans come to believe or disbelieve truth claims. We’ll focus more on how humans form beliefs in the next chapter, but for now the point is that dividing humanity into naive, credulous, pre-Enlightenment people on the one hand and sophisticated, skeptical, post-Enlightenment people on the other is, itself, a naive position to take.

Pre-Enlightenment people did not view the resurrection as just one more supernatural event among a sea of equivalent ones; they found it unbelievable. They were not gullible, they were incredulous. And on this side of history, post-Enlightenment people are not reflexively skeptical of evidence-free claims, or free from irrational fears. Just consider the anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, boycotters of genetically modified foods (all domesticated food is genetically modified), or credulous buyers of products that are all natural (cyanide is a naturally occurring product of many bacteria and plants; that doesn’t make it healthy).

In short: pre-Enlightenment people did not ignore evidence, and post-Enlightenment people do not always heed it. Scientific technology increased the scope of available evidence (e.g., lenses for telescopes and microscopes that see what our unaided eyes could not) and advanced powerful new explanatory paradigms and tools (like Newton’s calculus and Einstein’s relativity). These resources allow far more evidence to be gathered and also make it possible to analyze and assess that evidence in new ways. But they do not erase the mental habits, the irrational preferences, the biases and predispositions and emotional baggage we bring to every act of decision making. The fact of scientific progress does not guarantee a rigorous correspondence between available evidence and the beliefs we hold.

If you give someone a hammer, the effective force the person can apply to driving a nail will increase dramatically. But if you expect that giving someone a hammer will help the person run faster or jump higher, you are going to be disappointed. Hammers don’t make people intrinsically stronger; the tools of science don’t make people intrinsically smarter or wiser, either.

Secularists also mischaracterize religion as being solely, or even primarily, about helping individuals feel better about the grim prospects of mortality. Such a view ignores a vast array of additional functions that religions perform at the social rather than the individual level. For example, religion fosters greater trust among adherents, which in turn enables easier and more extensive cooperation. This is historically manifest in unique features of the modern West. As Joseph Henrich argues of the Christian inheritance, a peculiar set of religious prohibitions and prescriptions reorganized European kinship in ways that altered people’s social lives and psychology. Specifically, the restructuring produced a culture that by and large is quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others.⁷ That means religion is a kind of social technology that in at least some respects is as useful in the twenty-first century as it was in the first, and is in many ways more useful.

One of the most important