Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11
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The next installment in the Campolo father/son book is Bart’s chapter called “Can’t, Not Won’t: Losing Faith is Not a Choice.” Bart begins by saying that he encourages the newly de-converted, when sharing their story with friends and family, to begin by listing all the cherished values they learned in church, all the teachings of Jesus they love most dearly, and all the commitments to social justice and community building they still share. Only then talk about why they can no longer believe.
Rhetorically this is perhaps most helpful, but I do find myself wondering about a potential equivocation. In Bart’s case, anyway, he has abandoned moral realism. He no longer thinks there’s adequate foundation for believing in objective moral truths. So it remains unclear what’s meant by his “cherished values” unless he’s just presupposing a deep fact/value divide, but in which case, how stable is his professed love for such “values”? It largely seems as if he’s admitting that his worldview lacks foundations for such values, but because he remains personally committed to them, he takes them seriously still.
However, he could have easily gone in another direction, it would seem, as some atheists do. I’m not suggesting that all or most atheists do so, but the question of ontological foundations for our cherished convictions seems eliminable only at great peril. Why remain committed to such values when, say, doing so becomes costly—if one genuinely thinks they are not objectively true, prescriptively binding, or anything of the kind? It makes one’s value commitments a purely subjective and personal preference that, in principle, could vary from one day to the next.
Bart admits that early on, when he shared his de-conversion with others, he would get into the various reasons why he had grown skeptical of Christianity, which had the effect of putting believers on the defensive. He says he didn’t actually want to spoil anyone else’s faith, but it seemed that way when he took that approach. So eventually he says he learned to cut to the chase and claim something like this: “For reasons beyond my control, I simply stopped believing in God. The rest are just details.” In his case, “all that really matters is that over many years my ability to believe in any kind of supernatural reality gradually faded away, until I finally became convinced that the natural universe—matter, energy, and time—is all that exists.”
Bart claims he couldn’t retain his faith, and means to be taken seriously. “I didn’t choose not to believe in God; I just stopped believing.” He says it wasn’t willful. He had plenty of motivations to retain his faith. He says it didn’t happen on purpose; it happened to him, slowly but surely. God “disappeared before my eyes.”
The issue to which Bart is pointing here is quite an important one, pertaining to the matter of belief. It’s quite true that, for the most part, we don’t have direct volitional control over our beliefs. As I type this, my cat Mitty is lounging on my desk, partially behind the computer I’m writing on. Even if I were offered a hundred buck not to believe she’s there, I couldn’t do it. Beliefs don’t tend to work that way. We tend to be more doxastically passive than that; beliefs have a way of insisting on themselves, on the one hand, or exceeding our reach, on the other.
Then again, I resist Bart’s depiction of his de-conversion in wholly passive terms. I don’t think that’s true to life, either. Although we may not have direct volitional control over our beliefs, we surely, for at least a range of our beliefs, have indirect volitional control over them, it would seem. Pascal recognized this near the end of his Pensées, after offering several reasons to take faith seriously. Recognizing the challenge, he then pointed out that there are indirect ways of building faith. Our practices, our friends, our habits, our choices—all of these have an impact over time.
There are also indirect ways of undermining faith—bad theology, bad exegesis, bad hermeneutics, refraining from engaging in fellowship with fellow believers, living sinfully, etc. In a later essay Tony will suggest that Bart’s neglect of local Christian fellowship likely detracted from his faith.
But Bart seems to think that his volition and choices had little to nothing to do with his loss of faith. This seems monumentally unlikely. Having seen already some of the ways in which he processed the faith of his upbringing, for example, makes it, to my thinking, not unlikely that he would lose his faith. At least not a big surprise. Yet he persists in the claim: “For better or worse … none of us really chooses what we believe. No matter how motivated we might be, our sense of what is real is beyond our control.” Again, direct volitional control? Granted. Not even indirect volitional control? I doubt it.
So committed is Bart to this narrative that he expresses confusion that old Christian friends call and express their concerns and “hold me responsible for my obviously sincere lack of faith. After all, if Christianity is true, and there really is a God in heaven, he’s the one to blame.” Here he cites Paul in Ephesians 2:8-9 for evidence: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Again, I find Bart’s appeal to a biblical teaching the way he does quite misleading. That Ephesians passage, rightly understood, does not suggest that we play no volitional role in the acceptance of faith. Faith indeed is a gift, but gifts can be accepted or rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, in big ways and an aggregate of small ways. But Bart reads it this way (without much of any recognition that he could be wrong): “That faith is the gift of God, plain and simple. Which means, of course, that if there’s anyone my dear Christian friends, those concerned folks who keep reaching out to me, and especially my still-believing parents ought to be imploring, it is God, not me.”
Although I believe we can and should pray for our unbelieving friends and family, my theology is simply not this sort of monergistic picture of God according to which Bart’s decisions played no role in where he’s currently at. I think such a picture is defensible on neither biblical nor philosophical grounds; and in fact, I think there are hermeneutical, exegetical, and rational reasons to resist such a depiction. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Bart played a far bigger role in his de-conversion than he thinks.
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.
