By Harold W. Anderson, Ph.D., M.A., M.Div., MFT
When I was growing up, I was told that I must “believe.” In our house, belief was equated with faith so believing in the right things made a person faithful. What were we supposed to believe? It was the standard affair for anyone growing up in middle class Idaho. We believed in God. We believed that Jesus was God’s son and therefore he was also divine. We believed that Jesus would save our eternal souls so we could get to heaven when we died. We believed that the United States was God’s chosen land, etc. My household was a place of belief, but unlike many of my friends’ households, I was never discouraged from asking “why?” Sounding a little like Augustine, my parents thought that asking why would strengthen belief.
I tried. I knew I was supposed to believe, and I tried, but because of life experiences, I just couldn’t do it. Asking “Why?” did not strengthen my belief. When the kids at church, the ones who were supposed to be like Jesus…you know, they were supposed to love others, when these kids hated and bullied me, I had to ask why? If they were Christians, why were they so mean? What’s more, why didn’t their parents do something about it? Why?
There were other turning points in my life. My mother always taught me that racism was wrong, but we grew up in one of the racist states in the Union. If racism is wrong, then why tolerate racists? Why? They were everywhere, in the schools, in the churches, next door, all over. If it is wrong, then why don’t we do something about it? Why?
And then people began to do something. A Black woman refused to ride in the back of the bus. Black people sat in the white section of a restaurant, drank from white water fountains, organized and marched. I watched it on TV. I was about 12. People exercising their Constitutionally given rights were beaten by white police, knocked down as fire hoses ripped at their clothing, and attacked by the police dogs. Why were they treated this way? Were they not people like the rest of us? Were not the words of Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr.—a minister—inspired? Why?
I asked my parents why people who called themselves Christians could act so hatefully towards others. I don’t remember the answer I got, but I remember being told to believe, to have faith. “This world was only temporary anyway and when we get to heaven, everything will be put right” they told me. I never found that answer satisfactory. If God could make heaven just, why couldn’t God inspire justice in our everyday lives?
And then there was Vietnam. Thousands of young people went to the other side of the world, fought, and died. For what? It didn’t seem to make sense. Why were we fighting that war? Why? Young people took to the streets wanting to know why?
The question “why?” has guided my life. Sometimes, the paths were strange, sometimes they were dark and counterproductive, sometimes they we enlightening, but I always remembered that Jesus taught us to love no matter what path we walked down. I just wondered what that meant and began exploring different ways to discover how to love. Some of the lessons taught were hard lessons to learn, but through it all, the lessons I learned taught me that belief does not equal faith, and hate is never justified by love. It was the question “why?” that pulled me out of loyalty to a bunch of dogmatic ideals and helped me understand that justice is not something on a piece of paper but defines the way we interact with each other. Love is not something about which poems are written. It has to do with the way we receive others into our lives with respect and acceptance. Faith has little to do with dogmatic belief but is the courage to demand justice and accept the least of these with love.
When I was growing up, my parents were all about dogmatic beliefs. I rejected that. Their tolerance of my why’s, however, set me on a path of discovery. Opposite to what I had been told, I discovered that dogma is not faith. Instead, faith is the stubborn demand for justice. Despite their dogmatic beliefs, my parents did love me, and their love was a moral compass. Following that compass, I learned that love is guided by those Jesus called “the least of these,” and if we follow that compass, we will discover justice.
