What Is a "Faith-Based" Organization?

Huck Finn

I read about "faith-based" organizations and wonder what that means. In practice, "faith" covers a wild array of beliefs and practices that have little in common except lack of evidence. Huck Finn said that "faith is believing in something you know ain't true." Of course, this exaggerates. You don't necessarily know your faith isn't true. But the common denominator is that faith positions can't be publicly demonstrated. By faith, you believe what you don't know. Otherwise, it would be knowledge, not faith.

We're hard-wired to care about things we can't prove, existential questions. What's it all about? What's the purpose of life? Is there anything after death? If we confine ourselves to empirical data, we get Robot B-9's "It does not compute." In an episode of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, Number Six explodes a computer by asking it "Why?" Science is unsatisfactory, suggesting that life-purpose is an ad hoc mash-up of biological drives, culture, and private habits.¹  And, for all we can see, we simply stop living at death. But these are harsh answers, and religious beings look beyond the empirical for some sort of answer-giving authority. We need, or at least hunger for, existential hope.

Dozens of competing old books, such as the Bible, the Quran, the Sutras, Guru Granth Sahib, the Upanishads, the Agamas, and the Vedas, have functioned as existential authorities within their subcultures, but the worldwide flow of information has undermined them. Now many existential authorities are available in translation, contradictions between them on full display to any inquisitive reader, making it clear that only a private faith gives authority to any particular one.² They are all, from the perspectives of the others, "something you know ain't true."

We overgeneralize if we accept just any unproven belief as a faith. Trump's election deniers and Flat Earthers don't qualify, despite their bodies of true believers, because broadly accepted criteria are available to prove them wrong. Trump's claims were heard and dismissed by multiple judges he appointed, and many observations reveal the earth's curvature. These aren't faith-based like churches because they are falsifiable. Bona fide tests can show them untrue. 

A faith-based belief (as opposed to a false or untested one) is unfalsifiable, so hedged about by ambiguities,  obfuscations, or flat-out unknowables that no agreed-upon test can prove it false. Karl Popper argued that scientific theories must include tests to prove them false, a requirement for being taken seriously. 

A faith belief is one that can't be falsified. Bertrand Russell invented a famous example called Russell's Teapot, the claim that an undetectable teapot orbits the sun.³ Carl Sagan, along the same lines, coined the thought experiment of a man who claims to have an invisible fire-breathing dragon in his garage and blocks all attempts to falsify his claim with layers of new claims, such as that dragon flame is heatless.⁴ Faith beliefs may motivate personal feelings and actions (the dragon owner may feel protected by his beast and be careful to keep the garage door closed), but they are immune to disproof. In the empirical sense, faith beliefs are neither true nor false, but are what logical positivists called non-statements.

Of course, the positivist project of reducing everything to logic failed, and even skeptics act out untestable beliefs. It may be useful to philosophize about art and ethics, but nobody has devised an indisputable way--not culturally conditioned or subject to taste--to identify the beautiful or good. So religious faith isn't a ghetto outside the walls of sanity. It functions alongside art, love, entertainment, morality and other things that make the world go round without rising (or falling) to the level of what I've called Kalashnikov Truth, a self-demonstrating fact like that automatic rifles kill more quickly than muzzle-loaders, accepted by armies of even arch-conservative sects.⁵ 

Faiths are integrated into cultures, often impossible to disentangle from them, and are distinguished from art and ethics in that they answer existential questions in forms of myth, ritual, or theology. Faiths offer meaning to life, often through social groups. These are the faith-based organizations I puzzled over at the beginning, an odd spectrum from Wiccans to Unitarians. 

So finally I offer a definition: a faith-based organization (if more than a clunky political euphemism for "church") is an institution that gives unfalsifiable answers to existential questions and, at best, gives a sense of meaning and value to its members. In a literal sense, it contradicts other faith-based organizations but dispenses a non-literal truth, if truth at all, more like the truth of art than of science. Its truth is more functional than referential.⁶

References

¹ https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/11/the-meaning-of-life-part-i.html, https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/12/the-meaning-of-life-instinct-enacted.html, https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/12/the-meaning-of-life-3-passion-enacted.html, https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/12/the-meaning-of-life-4-paradise-promised.html.

² https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/02/the-loneliness-of-roach-lord.html.

³ https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/12/purple-elephants_16.html.

⁴.https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/05/carl-sagans-dragon-in-garage.html.

⁵ https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/kalashnikov-truth.html.

⁶ https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/07/if-creator-of-universe-god-of-judaism.html, https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/09/beloved-not-believed-semantic-heresy.html