At a recent (Christian) school event we attended as a family, I was intrigued to hear one administrator commend the faith to high schoolers.
“It works,” he assured. “It really works.”
I didn’t exactly disagree, but I was nervous at what might be considered his overpromising and God’s underdelivering. Would students think Christianity failed to “work” when they faced setbacks and suffered grief? A faith that “works” can too easily be conceived of instrumentally, as God delivering on an individual’s predetermined goods.
How should we talk about faith’s practical benefits without distorting its nature? It’s a question I considered as I read two recent books: Democracy Needs Religion by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa and Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by former BBC broadcaster Elizabeth Oldfield. The two books hail from post-Christian Europe—a context where religion’s presumed dangers are more culturally current than its virtues.
Both Rosa and Oldfield attempt to speak of the benefits of faith apart from the question of eternal salvation. Rosa argues that religion (most generally) offers the “apparatus” and “attitudes” to improve the democratic process today. Religion endows us with the capacity for patient listening, and a citizenry that listens can learn to disagree more civilly. Early in her book, Oldfield also envisions that faith can heal a fractured society, as—for example—wrath gives way to peacemaking. But her argument is essentially broader and richer than Rosa’s: Christianity “works” because it’s morally beautiful.
Political Benefits
Rosa’s audience is the faithful. His book, adapted from a 2022 lecture to the Roman Catholic clergy of the Diocese of Würzburg, challenges their fears of cultural irrelevance. Rosa argues that religion isn’t anachronistic (at best) or dangerous (at worst). Rather, to survive our cultural moment, democratic societies need religion’s structures and habits. Rosa argues that religion (Christianity and others) helps us listen, and if we’d just listen to each other, we could gain the empathy that allows us to disagree and yet live harmoniously.
In Rosa’s view, religion doesn’t simply counter the values of productivity and utility; it forms an “alternative relationship with the world” (55). This relationship is characterized by the “listening heart” that’s cultivated in religious faith and practice. This kind of “heart” involves an openness to being addressed, summoned, entreated, even transformed. He argues, “We must allow ourselves to be invoked—spoken to—if democracy is to succeed” (42). Without the capacity to really listen, an act which might cause us to reconsider ourselves and our reality, there will be no healing the hostile divides between you and me, between your political party and mine. We’ll have instead the “cold, soliloquizing, and deaf” heart that turns away from the other (63).
“The prevailing mood,” writes Rosa, “is that it’s not worth listening to others, because they’re simply irrational haters or dangerous traitors” (28).
A hefty dose of Rosa’s humility is welcome. However, as much as I’d like to, I can’t buy Rosa’s optimistic argument: If only we’d allow ourselves to be formed in the capacity to listen to one another, we’d have the world we want. I fear this reasoning is as fragile for religion as it is for democracy. It raises more questions than it answers: To what and to whom shall we listen? Are there never occasions for judging speech as worthless, inadmissible, or even dangerous?
While it’s true that public disagreement is too little tolerated, it’s also true that hate and cruelty exist. We might consider recent fights over speech on university campuses. If all we must do is listen, does this suggest that anything goes in public conversation? Listening is a good start toward the kind of consensus that might heal our politics, but it cannot help us get our moral bearings. If we’re only listening, who speaks to adjudicate truth?
In a post-truth world, Rosa’s vision of religious listening can lead us to no higher ground than living and letting live.
Existential Benefits
In Fully Alive, Oldfield’s memoir-inflected project that explores the Christian faith through the lens of the seven deadly sins, the author is a winsome interlocutor with the religious skeptic.
Listening is a good start toward the kind of consensus that might heal our politics, but it cannot help us get our moral bearings.
It’s an understatement to say that Oldfield “gets” the perspective of those outside the church, who doubt that religion “works” in any relevant or real way. She has banished from her book the glibness and naivete that passes for so much easy truth in Christian books. She knows to face head-on the hesitations about religion, that it might be primitive, unworkable, repressive, and even dangerous. At times, she uncomfortably concedes our flaws and errors, but she doesn’t back down from the “morally serious” project that Christianity entails.
Oldfield commends historic Christian commitments and attitudes, practices and convictions as more “workable,” both for individuals and communities, than their secular counterparts: sexual chastity instead of hookups, interdependence instead of pride, consignment-store clothes rather than the greedy fashions du jour. It’s the vices, she argues, that are proven uncreative and unconvincing—the virtues instead that demand notice and applause. Morality is like a glue that holds us and our world together.
In her argument, God isn’t ancillary to the discussion of existential goods, but he’s a subject left for the finale, when the pump has been proverbially primed. “Doing it ‘my way’ is the wide and foolish road,” she writes in the final chapter, “leading to a bleak and shrunken island. An acknowledgment of our need is the necessary condition for fullness of life” (230).
Oldfield knows the truth of the gospel: We don’t have the resources for self-renovation, even with all our wishing and trying for a more virtuous life. A pursuit of the virtues, apart from the pursuit of God, is like “a bottle of booze brought back from a sunny holiday”: it’s “not so delicious out of its original context” (240). Though many will find her far too ambivalent on culturally contentious ethical questions (like homosexual practice), she whets readers’ appetites for the God for whom they haven’t been looking. This is the God who listens—and who also speaks. Who comforts—and also commands.
Fulsome Nature of Christian Faith
What makes Oldfield’s Fully Alive so much more helpful than Rosa’s Democracy Needs Religion is its grappling with the moral import of the Christian faith. Christianity is a faith that emphasizes not simply listening but speaking. God calls—and we respond. We’re saved from sin and for newness of life. To emphasize human listening to the exclusion of divine speaking is to construct a faith where Jesus’s obedient submission in the garden is unnecessary. Your will be done.
We don’t have the resources for self-renovation, even with all our wishing and trying for a more virtuous life.
In contrast, Rosa argues that religion, at its worst, is dogmatic. Religion shouldn’t be the “guardian and defender of ultimate truths” (65). When religion defends and excludes, according to Rosa it abandons the receptivity and responsiveness inherent in good listening.
Certainly, moments in history have proven his point, though Rosa fails to account for what happens when religious people presume to hear God and obey impulses counter to revelation in Scripture and tradition. Ultimately, in Christian faith and practice, listening is most fruitful in an obedient relationship to God’s self-revealing truth. Insofar as we’re summoned, we’re also called to surrender. Herein lies the promise of spiritual transformation.
No, we need religion to return us, as Oldfield does in Fully Alive, to the language of virtue and vice and the promise that we might become “a people . . . zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). Christian faith calls us to listen, and in our listening, be conformed to the true and good and beautiful Way of Jesus.
Rosa celebrates not the truth claims of religion but the sympathy and humility it might inspire. More helpfully, Oldfield applauds Christianity’s moral clarity and believes this to be a compelling apologetic for its truth. Indeed, “while newer disciplines bring much insight and comfort,” she writes, “religions have a many-centuries head start in mapping the mysterious terrain of human depth” (17). In short, faith “works” insofar as it shows us ourselves—and traces the path of deliverance.
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