Alright then. It’s been a bit of a weird month. I took a holiday, went to New Zealand, had a gap in my writing schedule (very unusual, not happy about that), and we’ve been messing around with some different stuff – a bit of fiction, some stuff about the Horus Heresy – it’s not been business as usual. Let’s talk about something routine. About a month ago, we were talking about H. Richard Niebuhr’s Radical Monotheism and Western Civilization, a lecture series from 1957 at the University of Nebraska. It’s a hefty title for a volume of maybe a hundred and fifty pages – in essence, the Protestant Niebuhr was building up a definition of faith, almost more as a sociological phenomenon than in any strictly religious or supernatural context. A similar premise underpins Faith on Earth, a 1989 text published posthumously, nearly thirty years after Niebuhr’s death.

In this book, Niebuhr talks about how we keep faith and break faith with each other – how we are loyal, disloyal creatures. There’s an interesting passage in the first chapter, ‘Faith in Question’, where Niebuhr touches on the problem of trusting the people you read:

“We read the statements of Thomas Aquinas, Newman, Luther, Calvin, Plato, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey on the subject of faith with certain predispositions of trust or distrust. Complete disinterestedness may be possible in our encounter with things or even thoughts. But as we deal with thinking men we raise the questions: Can they be trusted? Where are they trying to lead me? What are they defending? This page is being read with some trust or distrust of the writer as a person or as representing a class; it is being written also with overtones of trust and distrust in readers of various classes, of fidelity and infidelity to a cause.”

This framing will be familiar to anyone with a religious background. If you’re brought up in any sort of faith, you’ll have heard a lot of discourse around which texts or which writers you should or shouldn’t engage with. There’s an idea, especially in conservative communities, that certain texts should only be encountered in the context of extreme distrust. And, in turn, there are texts that are considered totally trustworthy – like the Bible for Christians. It’s one of those things that non-believers often find difficult to understand about religion, because they aren’t necessarily primed to approach a text with that explicit framing of trust and distrust. That’s not because it’s an element exclusive to religion. It’s everywhere. When you read the bus timetable, for example, you approach it with a certain level of trust. You trust that it’s up to date, that it’s accurate, that someone in an office is making sure it’s all consistent with the bus’s actual schedule. Our trust might not be unconditional – we wouldn’t be surprised if the bus was running late – but it still makes up a core part of how we approach any given text. It’s not a religious thing per se: religions just tend to have a heightened sensitivity to questions about trust, because the things they’re talking about are held to be of existential, absolute importance.

You can understand, then, why a non-believer might have a difficult time comprehending that basic impulse of the scriptural religions. Why trust like that? Why would you invest that level of trust and expectation in some book? Between denominations or religions, we might hear a similar critique: you’re trusting that book to do something it doesn’t. That’s the heart of the critique against Biblical literalism, or against people who base their diet off what they ate in the Bible. You’re trusting that book in a way that it’s not meant to be trusted. You’re giving it the wrong type of loyalty. These critiques, from both inside and outside religion, flow down the same channel. They contest how we ought to trust in the book – what we ought to give to it, and what we ought to expect from it in return. Structurally they’re very similar, even though their starting suppositions might be miles apart.

I think there’s something in that critical impulse. There’s something in the complaint that we’re giving the wrong type of loyalty. Throughout this run of Protestant 20th century writers, a repeating theme has been the sovereignty of God, specifically over and above the systems and frameworks that we use to conceptualise Him and our relationship to Him. Niebuhr writes in Radical Monotheism about how our attachment to our religious sects is a form of idolatry, where the group allegedly pursuing the divine becomes so caught up in their own delineation of faith that they replace the divine with how they’ve defined it. Jacques Ellul similarly warns against the idolatry of good deeds, against thinking that we could somehow justify our place in the world by working hard and trying to do the right thing. There’s this constant resistance to any form of justification by or through the religious superstructure. Your sects are wrong. Your deeds are wrong. Trust in the divine is always trust in the beyond, not in the concept but in what it refers to. Trust isn’t ours to lean on. There’s something more out there.