Muslim Jesus in Oklahoma, or Believing is Doing

I have been teaching international students at one of the colleges where I adjunct, and more than half of them are from Saudi Arabia. The other half are almost all Chinese, but that's not at all relevant here, except to say that the overwhelming majority of international students at this school seem to come from two utterly disparate places, both of which struggle to understand the U.S. The classes are freshman composition classes, but the conversations regularly turn fascinating  because I decided early on that I was going to learn as much about their home countries, customs, practices, etc., as possible, both to develop teaching methods and examples that actually resonate and because I tend to be voraciously curious by temperament.

The assignment we are on right now is a compare/constrast essay. One of the students, a Muslim from Tunisia, which is incredibly moderate compared to Saudi Arabia, asked if he could compare and contrast Christianity and Islam. How could I say no to that? This generated a conversation between three of the Saudi students and me about American Christianity, Islam, and politics. I told them up front that I used to be a pastor and that I no longer am a person of faith. (They were mystified and a bit distressed to learn that their professor is a non-theist, I believe.) The conversation began with me acknowledging that I don't count terrorists as Muslims, a position they said they had heard all too rarely in the U.S. I explained that I teach world religions and am broadly familiar with Islam. One of the students asked me to explain Christian practice over against the idea of Islam's Five Pillars: creed, prayer, giving, fasting, pilgrimage.

As I thought through the differences and similarities between sacraments and Muslim practices, it occurred to me that I was speaking to people who had spent a lifetime, albeit a short one to this point, actually practicing a faith. For Muslims, the practices are the faith. The nearest parallel to be drawn was that baptism in the catechetical sense is close to the Shahada, the Muslim creed or confession: There is not God but Allah; Muhammad is the messenger of God. That confessions makes one a Muslim, but I had to explain that baptism, in the minds of most American Christians, does not make one a Christian. Imagine trying to explain the sinner's prayer to Muslims at this point; the idea is, of course, blasphemous to them, but they understand enough about Christianity to get the point. 

Finally, after working through the differences, one of the students observed that the American Christians he had met don't really practice a faith. "How would I know they are Christian? They don't do anything." He was not being harsh or critical. He meant that there is no way to spot a Christian in America: no prayer rugs, no ritualistic practices, no head coverings, no ablutions, no nothing. This is the legacy of Revivalism and Evangelicalism--an individualized faith devoid of any actual practice of a faith. (I'm assuming here that going to worship service isn't really a practice, but I could be convinced otherwise.) When the Muslim students assess who is a Christian, they look for practices, and their recognition of rampant Biblical illiteracy amongst the faithful causes them confusion. How do Christians not know their book? A fair question.

I tried to explain the dualistic mindset that leads to a believing/doing division in American Evangelicalism, but they didn't quite grasp the difference. I'll let Asem finish this out. He's brilliant and relatively moderate (compared to his Saudi classmates) in his positions vis-a-vis faith and freedom.

"What does it mean to believe but not to do? I suppose you can do anything you want in secret and pretend to believe in public, but that man does not believe in God. Practicing the faith is believing the faith. How can you do one and not both? How are they even different?"  

Comments

[Leighton]

It's a good question, and one that baffles me as much as it does your students. Hopefully this question isn't too off-topic: have you come across anything in your students' societies of origin that is puzzling to them the way fervent yet unpracticed Christianity is puzzling to us?

[cheek]

I like the thoughts here. I don't think the claim that belief and action are identical is defensible, though. The thought experiment he uses in the quote shows this. A person who pretends to believe in public but acts contrary to his stated belief in private. I think he is right in his claim that this private behavior undermines the man's claim claim to believe. It does not support the stronger claim that belief and action are the same thing. To see this, consider this question: is it possible to fake belief. That is, could someone act as though they believed for reasons other than belief? It seems clear to me that someone could. In fact, it's not preposterous to think that someone could always act as though she believed without actually believing. Suppose a woman living in a fundamentalist religious community believed that to keep herself and her family safe, she could not let anyone know that she secretly found the entire theology of the local religion to be nonsense. A person in her position might reasonably find it prudent to appear devout in all circumstances, even private ones, if she had any reason to believe that her private moments could be made public. So one could act devout without believing. So belief and action can come apart.

A more plausible claim might be that belief necessitates action that indicates belief (beyond the speech act of claiming to believe). While I think a defense could be made of this claim, even it seems too strong. It seems to ignore out tendency to compartmentalize our decision-making. For example, I believe that I should not eat refined sugar. I have a strong belief that the pleasure refined sugar brings me is in no way comparable to the ill-effects it has on my health. Very often I act on this belief, but I don't always. If I'm tired, or hungry, or both, and there's a candy bar on the table, there's a better than even chance that I'll eat it. Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have built careers offering answers for how such a thing could be so. But I think it is unlikely that the puzzle can be solved by simply claiming I don't actually believe that I shouldn't eat sugar.