One of the claims made most often against religious faith, especially the Christian faith, is that the Christian faith is simply “wishful thinking.” We should just face the facts, the argument goes. Either there is no God or God has nothing to do with us. We must simply resign ourselves to this cruel fact of existence. We are all alone. All we have is each other. This is it. There is nothing else. To believe in anything greater is simply wishful thinking. In my own case, however, I don’t feel that this argument holds much water. My faith is not wishful thinking, and I’ll explain why I feel that way in a little bit. Firstly, though, I want to explain why I think that for some people, actually for those who believe in a particular way, faith is actually just wishful thinking.
In a now famous nationwide study, University of Notre Dame professor Dr. Christian Smith surveyed thousands of teenagers and their parents about their religious beliefs. The picture that was painted by the results of this study showed that a huge number of people who self-identify as Christians actually believe in a version of God that is quite unlike the God that is portrayed in the Bible and in the traditional doctrines of the Christian church. Dr. Smith gave a name for this way of believing in God. He called it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Here are the tenets he deduced from the survey’s results:
1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
This way of believing says that the most important things are being a good person and being happy. By being good it means being a decent person. God is somewhere out there but you don’t really have to pay attention to God unless you’re in deep trouble and God doesn’t really expect anything of you. Elements of the Christian faith such as worship, study of the Scriptures, repentance from sin, a willingness to sacrifice, and any sort of a distinctly Christian lifestyle don’t make an appearance in this way of believing. God is seen as a “divine butler” or “cosmic therapist.” Folks who believe this way pray only when they want God to give them something or when they want God to help them feel better about themselves. God blesses whatever they do because that’s what makes them happy. They’ll go to heaven when they die because they were decent people, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they ever went out of their way to do good but at least they didn’t do anything terribly evil and they usually opened doors for people and things of the sort. Dr. Smith writes that “a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” On this subject, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean writes, “The problem does not seem to be that churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe, namely, that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and the church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people.” Now that’s wishful thinking… and idolatry.
This is all in contradiction with the Scriptures and with the traditional (what could be called orthodox) Christian faith. It is also in contradiction with one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes that I referenced quite a bit during the past six weeks in our Faith Begins at Home Sunday school class. Lewis writes, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance and, if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” Dr. Smith’s study revealed what a lot of us already knew—people are trying to live as though Christianity is moderately important, and that’s impossible. It is like the old cliché about trying to have your cake and eat it too. You can’t do it. That kind of faith is, in fact, wishful thinking and I join with atheists and agnostics in rejecting it as such.
The reason that I do not think that my faith is wishful thinking is that I don’t believe in that kind of way. I believe in a way that is called orthodox (not to be confused with Greek Orthodox) by many who share the same way of believing in Jesus Christ. This just means that I believe in the basic doctrines of the Christian faith that come from the Scriptures and are summarized in the Apostles’ Creed. In fact, that is how the esteemed G.K. Chesterton (a Roman Catholic), in his book aptly titled Orthodoxy, defines the orthodox faith he defends—the faith summarized in the Apostles’ Creed. C.S. Lewis uses the term “mere Christianity” instead of orthodoxy. The reason that I don’t feel that this kind of faith is wishful thinking is that I would never wish for the God that I find in the Bible or in traditional Christianity. I would not have come up with a God who takes sin and the accompanying injustice so seriously that he will punish his own chosen people repeatedly with conquest and exile. I would not have come up with a God who allows so much suffering in the world. I would not come up with a God who requires of me great sacrifices. I would not have come up with a rescue plan for sinful humanity that involved a virgin conceiving, wise men and shepherds visiting, a Galilean peasant preacher, a ragtag band that includes fishermen and a tax collector, a savior who wastes his time healing lepers before being betrayed by a friend, rejected by his own people, and executed in the nastiest way imaginable. I never would have come up with having him rise from the dead. I never would have come up with a God who insists on my ultimate allegiance to him. It all seems too strange and fantastical to me.
I would never wish for the God in which I have put my trust. I do not put my trust in the God revealed in the Bible and ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ because that’s who I came up with in my imagination. If I wished up my own God it would be a God that didn’t expect any more of me than just being a halfway decent person. It would be a God who left me alone to do what I wanted to do, to do what feels good all the time. It would be a God who would help me out by doing what I wanted God to do when I wanted God to do it. If I wished for a God it would be for a God who was my divine butler or my cosmic therapist. That’s why I know my faith is not just wishful thinking. I believe in the God of the Bible not because I wished for that God but because I believe the God revealed in the Bible is the real God. It is not what I would have come up with, but it is what I believe to be the actual truth. I never would have wished for all that. Yet, I believe it. I don’t just believe it intellectually. I put my trust in the truth of these events and the God behind them. I’ve given my entire life to this God and I am working day in and day out to live my life with this God and to raise my children to put their trust in this God as well. My very vocation is to help others to trust in this God and to live their lives in relationship with this God. But I don’t do this out of wishful thinking. I do this because I wholeheartedly believe, like all traditional Christians, that this is reality.
Let me see if I can illustrate this somehow. Let’s think of a hot, very windy, day. Trash is blowing around and flower pots keep blowing over. People’s hair is getting messed up. It’s hard to open car doors without them slamming shut immediately. I don’t agree with this wind. I don’t like a hot fast wind. I think I’m going to convince myself that the wind is really just a pleasant breeze that will make me comfortable on a pleasant spring day. My wishful thinking doesn’t change the wind though. So let’s try something else. I’m going to go inside so that I can just ignore the wind. However, when I go inside I can still hear it rattling the windows, and even if I couldn’t hear it this still wouldn’t change the fact that the hot powerful wind is still out there. So I can ignore the wind or wish that the wind was a different kind of wind but neither one of those things will actually be facing the truth of what is real and happening. The wind is there. I wouldn’t have come up with it myself, but it is there. Then I realize that the best thing to do, in fact what I am supposed to do, even what I was made to do, is not to fight or ignore the wind but to surrender to it. I could go outside and find a way to join in with the wind. In fact, if I was sailing a boat, I’d actually need this very same hot powerful wind. So I decide that this is precisely what I will do—I will put my boat in the water, I will open up my sails, and I will let the hot powerful wind carry me where the wind wants to carry me, not where I want to go. I wouldn’t have wished for that, but, oh, it’s so much better than I would have wished for, than I could have ever imagined.
I’ll continue this next week…
May you have a blessed Holy Week. I will see many of you on Maundy Thursday as well as on Good Friday.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett
