Most Of Us Are Agnostics. Even Preachers.
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(OPINION) Across my many years of writing columns about faith, values and religion, I’ve received thousands of responses from readers across the United States and around the world.
I’m so old that in my early days, those responses showed up as letters, mainly hand-written, in envelopes bearing postage stamps.
Eventually, letters gave way to emails, private messages and comments on social media. Whatever medium they used, however, a couple of things about my correspondents became clear.
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First, there were two types of readers who seemed absolutely certain about God: fundamentalists and atheists. It was eerie, kind of.
The fundamentalists believed absolutely in the existence of God and the unerring rightness of their doctrines. The other group believed just as devoutly in God’s non-existence. To them, nobody but a fool could think there was some invisible “sky daddy” out there in the cosmos watching over us.
Yet their responses were practically interchangeable. They were two sides of the same coin. They entertained no doubts. They brooked no dissent. They mocked those of other persuasions. They tended to be, for want of a better description, smug — and bellicose.
Second, the great majority of readers weren’t like that. In between the fundamentalists and atheists lived lots of folks who possessed more questions than answers. Their spiritual worldview was made up less of blacks and whites than shades of gray.
They didn’t strike me as wishy washy so much as humble. And humility was a cardinal virtue, I thought, not a damning sin.
Maybe I just liked these people better. I came from a fundamentalist Christian background, but the letters and emails from folks in the wide middle resonated for me in a way the missives from absolutists at either extreme didn’t.
I eventually decided most people are agnostics to a greater or lesser extent. Even churchgoers. Even ministers.
(This observation isn’t original to me, but I’ve stumped myself trying to track down who said it first. The best I’ve come up with, via help from artificial intelligence, is an ArtsJournal item from 2016 titled, “If We’re Honest, We’re All Agnostics In A Way,” by Matthew Westphal. To my knowledge, I’ve never read ArtsJournal or heard of Westphal.)
Anyway.
When I say most of us are agnostics, I mean we’d probably like to know for certain whatever humans can know of God. We appreciate good, solid, indisputable truth.
But we don’t know, really. We may think we know, or hope we know, or pray to know, yet we find it’s really hard to be sure about any of it all the time. Our spirituality, like a trick knee, has its good days and bad days. We believe in God … and we don’t.
Some folks who are agnostics lean mainly toward unbelief. They’re atheist-adjacent. They’re probably the people we think of first when we hear the term agnostic.
Others, though — I’m one of these — are agnostics who incline toward faith. I incline so far toward faith that I’ve been a pastor for decades and have helped lead other people toward their own measure of belief.
Still, I also recognize my capacity for error and self-deception. I realize that half the things I adamantly assumed to be true 30 or 40 years ago about human nature, government or, for that matter, UFOs have turned out to be wrong. Why would my beliefs about God be any different? Life lived honestly creates comeuppances.
Being an agnostic isn’t a bad thing. It’s almost unavoidable if you’re thinking seriously. There are just too many unknowns.
We can start with a few of the more obvious ones.
If there’s a God and if that God wants us to believe and to have fellowship with him, then why would he choose to remain invisible and silent? I don’t know.
If there’s a God who’s both all-powerful and all-loving, why does that God allow little children to suffer unspeakable abuse at the hands of people they depend on? I don’t know.
If Jesus brought the kingdom of heaven to Earth to redeem the planet and turn it once again into a Garden of Eden, then why, 2,000 years later, is it still so unredeemed? I don’t know.
What we know with 100 percent certainty might, if we’re lucky, fill a thimble, but what we don’t know fills the remainder of the universe.
Even Jude, the half-brother of Jesus Christ, admonished his fellow Christians to “have mercy on those who are doubting.” Those sound like the sentiments of a guy who’d experienced doubts himself.
I think modern Western Christians often misunderstand what “faith” really meant to our early brothers and sisters. If memory serves me, the renowned New Testament scholar N. T. Wright (among others) has said Westerners tend to see faith as a matter of subscribing to a predetermined checklist of theological propositions.
Virgin birth? Check. Free will? Check. Bodily resurrection of Christ? Check. When we can check all the proper boxes, we have faith. Until then, we don’t.
But the New Testament understanding was different. The ancient Greek word for faith was “pistis”. It meant to swear devotion to a sovereign ruler — Caesar, for example — and pledge to follow wherever he led.
A definition like that puts a different spin on things.
I’m in many ways an agnostic. Nonetheless, I’m a Christian, too.
Those statements aren’t contradictory.
A half-century or more ago, in a fit of spiritual zeal, I pledged my devotion to Jesus Christ. Ever since, I’ve done my best to go with him wherever he, or life, or the universe has taken me, including into some very dark, tight spots.
Sometimes God has felt as near as the breath in my lungs. Sometimes God has felt as unreachable as Alpha Centauri. Sometimes I’ve been able to check with assurance every blessed item on the Protestant theological tote board. Other times, that list has seemed pure crackpot gibberish. Sometimes the list has transmogrified before my eyes.
But in all circumstances, I’ve done my imperfect best to follow my sovereign, even when I had no idea where he was going and didn’t much believe he existed.
True faith is less about certainty than surrender, I find.
With the help of a God I occasionally don’t believe in, I’ve managed to be both an agnostic and a dedicated disciple.
I’m positive I’m not alone in that.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a monthly column about faith and religion for Religion Unplugged.