"Can Got Religion ": The Practicality of Faith

At the risk of beating a dead Pascal, I want to challenge two assumptions in his argument that belief in God is infinitely more lucrative than unbelief. One is that the main motive for unbelief is the unbeliever’s concupiscence (often sexual desire but not limited to that). People disbelieve so they can be free to misbehave. Another is that unbelievers benefit in a finite way by liberating themselves to pursue to unbridled pleasure.

Pascal himself contradicts these elsewhere when he says that Christian belief  makes a person “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend" (418). Anything that deprives a person of this is hardly a benefit, even a finite one. I doubt, however, that these benefits actually proceed from belief, having read extensively in newspapers, autobiographies, and popular fiction from the 19th-century South, where the existence of God, sin, heaven, and hell were taken for granted. Belief in God was well-nigh universal among common folks, but there were still crooks and scoundrels--anything but faithful, honest, humble, grateful, and full of good works. Some were defiant hellhounds. Others banked on reforming before they died. In any case, belief in God and moral rectitude are loosely correlated. If you aren't acquainted with righteous unbelievers, you should get out more.

Few people, I think, reform on their deathbeds for eternal reward as opposed to the consolation of anticipating it, which is a different thing. I distinguish between, say, writing a first novel in the hope of publishing it and going to work on a job for a contracted paycheck. In the first case, I act in hope of a reward that exists at the time solely in my imagination. Just as, absent a book contract or a reputation, I write with no present assurance of publication, so a Christian convert acts on faith with no present assurance of any sort of postmortem advantage, having never died and been rewarded.

Eternity, in the sense of an infinite period of time, is inconceivable. The estimated 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang is less than a trillionth of a microsecond compared to infinite time—indeed infinitely briefer than that. Even if a God exists on the scale of all past time and a trillion future universes, we cannot confidently credit Him with infinite duration until all eternity has played out, which can never happen, so no guarantee is impossible. No doubt, all we can comprehend anyway is “a really honking big pile of time,” and that should be enough to tip Pascal’s Wager toward belief on the basis of self-interest. However, given the impossibility of any real assurance of a vast, unknown, future consolation, we are mostly drawn to the palpable, present consolation of anticipating it, which is a sure thing. The heavenly consolation of orthodox Christian faith is a Heart Truth felt in the present that is rhetorically pitched into eternity, but, as such, it often results in a happier life in the finite here and now.

Clara’s father in America, even if dead or a scoundrel, consoles her, and, if she does manage to survive the Irish famine and marry a good husband, faith in her father may well mitigate her PTSD, especially if she can avoid blaming him for not returning. She will be a better and happier woman. This is a function that religious faith often serves. Even in better times than Clara’s, our lives are out of our control. Death comes sooner or later in a world that is only sporadically just and satisfactory. Hard times follow good, nothing endures, bad things happen to saints, and we are not guaranteed even one more hour. A friend of mine was talking with a woman when suddenly he “switched off.” The EMS found him dead of a brain aneurism.

One scriptural emblem of our lack of control is Job, who loses family, wealth, and health suddenly for no reason and is badgered by friends to admit that a just God is punishing him for his sins—in other words, that Job is in control of his fate and could have avoided disaster by behaving. Job resists and eventually finds consolation by accepting a lack of explanation from an inscrutable God who rewards his acceptance, not with eternal life (this being an earlier age before the Pharisaic belief in an immortal soul), but with a new family, more wealth, and long life. I doubt if Job’s dead sons and daughters would have been happy with this resolution.

Not only is the world beyond our control, but our own will is unruly and often resists our best intentions. I am reminded of the Zen story of a man riding on a galloping horse. “Where are you going?” a bystander calls out. He answers, “I don’t know. Ask the horse.” The out-of-control horse suggests the habits, distractions, compulsions, aversions, and addictions that drag us willy-nilly through a life of suffering, a runaway beast that religion sometimes reins in. It is interesting that religious conversion often produces results identical to good secular counseling. The supernatural activates common sense, good hygiene, and a sense of community. Alcoholics Anonymous, detached from any sectarian religious program, still instructs its members depend on a Higher Power—it doesn’t seem to matter which one—to overcome their addictions.

When I was a little boy visiting my mother’s elderly parents deep in rural Alabama (inside the Talladega National Forest), a middle-aged black man called Can helped out on the farm and lived in a log house that my relations had abandoned in the 1800s. Can’s father Jerry, an older contemporary of my granddaddy, was born in 1865, the last days of slavery, and by 1900 he lived the log house, where Can, his only son, was born in 1901. Ten years later my mother was born, and, by the time I visited Bibb County, the two families had been allied for half a century. Jerry survived past ninety, so I was a teenager before he died, but I never saw him. I did see Can when he came to my grandparents’ house like kin, though always by the back door. 

In 1952, Can had a two-year-old son, and when my parents drove up to his house about then, I saw the boy standing by the road in nothing but a short cotton shirt, bare below the waist, looking third-world. I was shocked. Now I know this was customary before washing machines made diapers practical and persisted among the rural poor. Can’s family in 1952 was medievally poor, living in the utter lack of modern amenities in a hundred-year-old log shell—shockingly poor to my middle-class, town-bred eyes--and Can's disadvantages of racial discrimination, isolation, and lack of education were exacerbated by his personal habits.

By the time I knew Can, my Granddaddy was semi-retired from farming, and Can was working day labor—the sawmill as I recollect—but he still came over to beg for food. My grandparents were kind and welcoming, treating him like a wayward son, but they did mention his problem. Can drank. Apparently, much of his small income (the 1940 census claims $104, two bucks per weekend) was blown on Saturday night drunks. Imagine my surprise ten years later, by then a college student, when I was back in the country with my parents and we drove by Can’s place. The log house was gone, in its place a snug little Jim Walters with a stovepipe, electric lights, and a TV antenna. I didn’t recognize the place. 

“What happened?” I asked. Mother’s answer was simple: “Can got religion.” Religious conversion hadn't just delivered hope of eternal bliss. It had delivered I Love Lucy and Ed Sullivan.

This is the kernel of truth in the prosperity gospel and the basis for Methodism’s teetotal ministry to workers in the Industrial Revolution. If you’re ruining your life with bad habits, a conviction of supernatural help and the support of a loving congregation can help you break the cycle. Jesus tirelessly condemns wealth in the Gospels, so it is plainly anti-scriptural to suggest that prosperity is a divine reward for goodness, but conversion can help to break bad habits, an important way that it rewards “believers” in finite life irrespective of Pascal’s infinite reward.

Work Cited

Pascal, Blase. Pensees. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Books, 1995.