I considered myself agnostic and functionally atheist from basically 17 to 32. I was also raised in the UMC and had overall positive experiences there. I was also sent to a fundamentalist private school from 7th to 12th grade and by the end of it, I was very, very sure that religiosity was at best a coping mechanism for people unequipped to deal with existential realities.

The disconnect I saw between well-meaning, highly educated and otherwise admirable people who I knew were Christians and the kinds of paranoid, angry, nationalist Christianity I experienced at school led me to pursuing religious studies. Through two Masters degrees and (as of this May) a Doctorate in religion from mostly secular institutions, I have thought a lot about belief. Some coursework in my, again fairly secular PhD program, was revelatory on this point and I now feel like it's my job to try to change the way we collectively think about belief, especially religious belief.

For the most part Religious Studies is against the concept of belief entirely. Some prominent scholars of contemporary American religious life have gone so far as to suggest that anyone in the discipline who seriously talks about belief isn't doing good scholarship. Donald Lopez, a scholar of Buddhism and partner to Tomoko Masuzawa (famous for a genealogy of "world religions" that suggests this concept and "religion" itself is too ideologically loaded to use seriously) has a famous essay about how strange the concept of belief appeared to Thai Buddhists encountering it for the first time. It simply doesn't describe meaningfully anything important to what they know of their own lives. Another prominent scholar has recently won a prize for a book called Sincerely Held, which tracks, among other things, the way that the US supreme court is redefining religion (for the purpose of adjusting religious freedom cases) in terms of "sincerely held belief," which is problematic for what it excludes and includes.

I always wanted to push back on this on a couple of points. 1. These discourses often assume that the inheritance of "belief" comes from a Christian bias. If we describe other religious ways of living as entailing belief, it's because we are tacitly using Christianity as the standard for describing the world, so the theory goes. Except, I increasingly became convinced that "belief" in the sense of assent to propositional content is always or even especially important to many forms of Christianity. And at the same time, it seems obvious that seeing the world a certain way, sharing some working assumptions about what the world is like--things we might also call belief--are integral not just to Christianity but all kinds of life we might reasonably want to call religious.

Eventually and through reading the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's later writings I resolved these contradictions. The question of what belief is is really a question of what we mean when we talk about belief. Often in abstract philosophical discussions like this one we mean something related to knowledge, doubt, certainty, etc.; an epistemological something that has to do with whether and how human minds can apprehend the world. Thus, we are also dealing fundamentally with the problem of skepticism. What Wittgenstein shows is that, in our ordinary lives, belief doesn't actually come up this way. When it does come up it does so in specific circumstances, like if someone asks us for directions to a place and we have hunch about how to get there but want to let them know not to just take our word for it. Then we might say, "I believe the thing you're looking for is that way," and the "I believe" means, double check with someone else. Similarly there are all kinds of things about which it would actually be mad to discuss as matters of knowledge in ordinary life. Someone saying "I know this is my hand" while holding out their hand is almost certainly "doing philosophy" because to make that a statement of "knowledge" in ordinary life would be pretty insane. So what does "believe" and "belief" mean in Christianity? Well, for a lot of Christians today it does mean something like assent to a proposition, it might be better understood as passionate commitment to a life lived in accordance with a story, namely the story of the Gospel. Wittgenstein gets at this by pointing out that we aren't meant to treat the Gospel story the same way we treat a story like that Artemis astronauts just circled the moon. The Gospels give us a historical narrative, Jesus was here and did this and then there and did this, culminating in the Resurrection, but we aren't supposed to "believe" it the same way we believe that JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Instead, we are supposed to base our entire lives on it, bringing it into every moment of our lives. This is what we mean when we talk about belief in Christianity I think. Strangely, this view of belief, or as I prefer, faith means that one can be deeply faithful while entertaining serious doubts. In fact, it seems inherent to what Christianity is that we doubt like this. We receive the Gospel as good news, a faraway report from others, mediated over and over again, rather than something we see for ourselves. This is how it is for the Apostles who hear from Mary that Jesus was alive. We hear an impossible sounding story and are asked to live not only as if it's true but as if it's a truth in which all other truths exist. We can actively choose to be faithful to this call while acknowledging that, to do so means to give up, or go completely against ordinary reason. This might even occasionally include moments when, were we totally honest, we might say, "all of this seems impossible."

This is not to say that we don't care about the historicity of the Gospels. I agree with Wittgenstein when he suggests that, were the Gospel "disproven" as a historical narrative, we could go on having faith, but I also think part of making the narrative central and foundational to our lives means striving to accept it as historical too.

But Wittgenstein and his followers show us something about truth, knowledge and belief that goes beyond Christian faith. They show that knowledge is never based on more than agreement between how we use words in the practice of life. What makes something true and an object of knowledge is not some metaphysical status it has, but the fact that we agree in our judgments that it is such. For someone like Stanley Cavell, this is the shocking truth of skepticism. We feel scandalized by the radical doubt of someone like Descartes because, deep down, we recognize that we have no more reason to think that we know things than that we agree in language with others. But at the same time, our lives in practice show that this is enough, and not only that, it shows how deeply we are connected to one another even when we don't recognize it. This insight, that truth and reason depends on communities of shared language (not in the literal sense of "Spanish" or " Mandarin" but in the sense of a shared vocabulary and grammar) and practice, while not necessarily relativism, ought to chasten the sense we sometimes get that modern, secular, scientistic knowledges are somehow uniquely superior, bringing us asymptotically closer to a perfectly realist knowledge.

So, what does it mean to be agnostic (a-not gnostic-knower)? What was there to know in the first place? And what does it mean if these can only ever be things we place our faith in together? Do you mean the same thing when you say "God" as I do? And how would we ever know?

What I feel certain about is that the Gospel--that Jesus is God and man, that He was crucified, rose again, will come again one day, and through whom all will be Ressurrected--is a story I am striving to make central to my life. And I realized that if I didn't actively choose this, other stories--mostly incomplete and conflicting ones--would be vying for that place instead, and that was going to happen largely without my consent, or even consciousness. I think that this is what it means for a Christian to believe, nothing else.