PERSPECTIVE: Faith can come in many forms, even for nonbelievers

KOBAI SCOTT WHITNEY | • Published May 09, 2009

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In 1985, the poet and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry wrote a very brave book on the American race issue from the point of view of a white family that had once "owned" other people. It was his own family he was talking about. His interactions with African-American and white elders as a young man growing up in the post-Civil War South became the raw material of this book called "The Hidden Wound."

One of the things Berry recalled was the ironic fact that both slaves and slave owners were of the same faith, and sometimes sat in the same small rural churches attending the same services – though seated separately, of course.

“How do you get to heaven?” Berry asks rhetorically, “Well, ... you get there by obeying the moral imperatives of the Scripture, by loving one another ‘in deed and in truth.’ But the churches, with their strong ties to the pocketbooks of racists, felt obliged to see it another way: the way to heaven was by faith; one got there by believing.

“When the ministers of these churches turned their attention to the world,” Berry adds, “they did so with the puritanical passion of St. Paul, violently opposing such ‘sins’ as drinking, failure to attend church and ‘immorality’ – sins of somewhat questionable status in the first place, and which the church found it easy enough both to condemn and to live with.”

This fury for belief is one of the core properties of fundamentalism, whether we are talking about Muslims or Catholics, Buddhists or Baptists. Remember that the conservative Romans considered the early Christians to be atheists, because they did not honor the Roman gods. But even the Romans did not require belief, just a few bows and scrapes toward the gods of Rome. The Greeks were sometimes openly skeptical about their own gods, yet they went on inventing them and borrowing them from neighboring cultures. For them, any force that had more power than a human being and that outlasted a human lifetime was a god. So there were gods of storms and of love, of the sea and of the sun.

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