How Religion Happens

I've been meaning to comment on this for a few months. Not long after the earthquake in Haiti, a few weeks after, I heard a news story. The reporter interviewed a local who talked about the destruction of this and that building. She spoke specifically of the destruction of churches, always a somewhat awkward bit when dealing with natural disasters.

Yes, she said, many churches were destroyed in the earthquake, and many of the faithful were having a hard time understanding why God should have allowed (or caused) such a thing. She went on to observe, however, that in her church, the crucifix didn't fall down, even though the rest of the building did. Moreover, the same had been the case in churches all across Haiti. The churches fell, but not the crucifixes.

Thus were the faithful justified in their faith.

Now, chances are, this nice lady did not go around Haiti personally verifying this little factoid. It's practically the very definition of faith that one doesn't check, one simply believes. I have no doubt that this "fact" has passed into legend, at least within her own circle if not more widely, where it will be immune from checking for ever more.

And it hit me then and there: this is how religion happens. Faced with calamity, we struggle to make sense out of the random cruelty of the universe. We see a thing, or think we see it, or we hear of a thing, and this thing both justifies and comforts us, so we cling to it and nurture it, and we would never dream of subjecting it to anything like objective verification. It's as if we believed we'd learned to fly by flapping our arms. Why would a fellow want to stop flapping his arms? Just to check? Get outta here.

So, in churches all across Haiti, the buildings fell but the crucifixes stood, and surely this Means Something, though people won't say what. They'll just repeat the story to one another and nod their heads and be comforted.

Flap, flap, flap.