I recently came upon an article in the Washington Post about an atmospheric scientist named Kathrine Hayhoe. Hayhoe, who is a director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, is also a lead author of the U.S. government’s latest National Climate Assessment, which clearly states that the climate effects we are already suffering from are going to dramatically worsen unless we act now.
Hayhoe is also something one doesn’t typically associate with climate science, namely a devout Evangelical Christian married to an Evangelical minister. For Hayhoe, the climate problem, while best understood through science, can be solved only through faith. Faith in one another. Faith in our ability to do something bold, together. Faith that the pain of change and the sacrifices required will lead to a promised land. Hayhoe’s schedule is booked months into the future with appearances in schools, churches, TV and radio studios, and at conservative colleges where she has been accused of “spreading Satan’s lies.” She has built followings on Twitter, YouTube and TED.com, where her talk on climate has racked up an impressive 1.7 million views.
Last month Hayhoe gave the keynote address at the national conference of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby, an international grassroots environmental group that trains and supports volunteers to build relationships with their elected representatives in order to influence climate policy. In addressing this largely secular group of climate activists, she said “We humans have been given responsibility for every living thing on this planet, which includes each other… We are called to tend the garden and be good stewards of the gifts that God has given us.” For Hayhoe, being good stewards of the earth requires a very active form of faith, faith not as set of dogmatic theological beliefs, but rather as an active collaboration with the divine in the preservation the earth.
Despite the growing popularity of Hayhoe’s message, for many modern people, Hayhoe’s mixing of the language of hardcore scientific research with the language of faith feels deeply uncomfortable. I suspect that at least some of our reservations are based on the tendency to use the words “faith” and “belief” as if they we were entirely synonymous. While faith and belief once were identical in meaning and usage, since the time of the Enlightenment these two words have diverged from each other.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, one of the foremost historians of religion of the twentieth century, writes of about this growing difference between faith and belief. Describing what he considers the essence of faith, Smith writes that it is fundamentally “a quality of human living.” The highest manifestation of faith, says Smith, is “a quiet confidence and joy which enables one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate.” Belief, in contrast, says Smith, is the holding of certain ideas about the object of faith, whether that object is a deity, a philosophy, a set of principles, or an economic or political movement.
While I find Smith’s distinction between the faith and belief both useful and meaningful, I think this question becomes a bit more nuanced in the light of this blog post, which asks the question “Is faith a noun or a verb?” If we think of faith as a noun – a fixed object – then it is very much like belief, concerned with passively accepting some idea about the sacred. In contrast, understood as a verb – a dynamic process – faith is about actively manifesting the sacred through the living of our lives.
I find it interesting that conceiving of faith as a noun rather than as a verb is somewhat uncommon in the history of religion. For example, in Pali, the language of the most ancient Buddhist texts, faith is grammatically a verb, an action, as it also is in Classical Latin and Hebrew. In the context of these ancient languages, faith means to trust, to confide in, or to rely on. This ancient understanding of faith as a verb, as action, is particularly noteworthy given the strong association between faith and belief in the West, a connection due to the influence of Christianity in the development of the Western perspective. Ever since the fourth century, adherence to statements of creed has been the been the hallmark of what it means to call oneself a Christian.
This has never been the case, however, for many of the world’s other religious traditions. For example, Judaism has never concerned itself very much with what Jews are supposed to believe. Rather, being Jewish is about actively living a life centered on following the teachings found in the Torah and other sacred texts, teachings about justice, mercy, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and what Jews call “Tikkun Olam,” which means “the healing of the world.” And to Buddhists, belief is considered irrelevant at best, and at worst a hindrance to the daily practice of mindful awareness and non-attachment in the living of our lives. To practicing Buddhists, what matters is that we follow what their tradition calls “The Eightfold Path,” a centerpiece of which is called “Right Action.”
Faith as a verb — an action not an object — means faith is not something we either have or don’t. Instead, as Unitarian Universalist minister Justin Schroede writes,” it is a step, a leap we take over and over again, a trust and loyalty that grows over time.” Describing such faith, Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist author and teacher, says “Faith is what gets us out of bed, it’s what gets us on an airplane to an unknown land… it is saying, ‘I align myself with the potential inherent in life, I give myself and my heart to that potential.’ Faith, she continues, is the willingness to take the next step, to begin a journey to an unknown destination.”
Faith as a verb is more active than cognitive, emphasizing how we treat each other, raise our children, vote in elections, invest and spend money, care for those who need our help, and more. Faith understood this way is about our daily activities and practices, putting the accent on acting out our faith rather than simply thinking about it. Only when we think of faith as a verb can it be a living, evolving dimension of our lives and only then can faith be a force for transforming both our own lives and the world around us. Faith as a noun, passively trusting that love, compassion, justice, and equality will triumph over hatred, cruelty, injustice, and racism is simply not enough. But a living faith in these virtues embodied in dedicated action – faith as a verb — can bring about the world we dream of.