Episode 6: Faith as Certainty — A Complicated and Consequential History

This episode is about the difference between humble faith and weaponized faith. The difference matters enormously, and our public conversation regularly collapses the two. So I want to draw the line carefully, before I make the harder argument.

I am not arguing that religious faith is inherently harmful. I am not arguing that people of faith are intellectually deficient or that religious experience is meaningless. I'm an agnostic — which means I do not have a clue whether there is a God or some form of transcendence that the word God gestures toward. I’m simply applying critical thinking and being honest about uncertainty.

Not knowing doesn’t fill me with dread or stop me from living my life to the fullest. There is no fight-or-flight response, because it’s not necessary. Quite the opposite. Acknowledging uncertainty is what triggers curiosity, the desire to seek knowledge and find answers. And that is liberating. It is empowering. None of this happens if we settle for false certainties. 

I want to hold that position openly for a moment, because it's different from the position of the people whose faith I'm criticizing in this chapter, and different from the position of those who think all religion is simply false and religion's public role obviously illegitimate. 

I was raised in a household that had a complex relationship with religion. I had experiences — the experience of community held together by shared commitment, the experience of hearing people articulate a vision of human dignity and mutual obligation that was genuine and inspiring. I do not dismiss those experiences as meaningless. 

What I can tell you is that the faith that produces those experiences is categorically different from the faith addressed in this podcast. The faith that produces genuine humility, that's held with the tentativeness appropriate to questions that transcend human knowledge, that produces the commitment to human dignity rather than the defense of hierarchy — that faith is not what I'm arguing against. I'm arguing against the weaponization of faith. The political deployment of religious certainty to override the rights of people who are applying critical thinking and acknowledging uncertainty.

The history of Christianity in America is, in many ways, the history of that tension. Between the prophetic tradition that calls the powerful to account for their treatment of the vulnerable. And the priestly tradition that legitimates existing power arrangements by blessing them. Both are present in Christian scripture. Both have been influential in American religious life. The question is which has been more influential, and which is more influential now.

The history of every theocratic state in the modern world makes this point with painful clarity. Iran's Islamic Republic, which came to power promising justice and freedom from corrupt secular authority, has governed for four decades through a system in which religious law overrides democratic accountability. The Supreme Leader is not elected. His authority derives from his interpretation of divine law. The consequences for women, dissidents, religious minorities, and LGBTQ people have been catastrophic.

The structural logic of faith-based governance, wherever it has been implemented, produces governments that are accountable to an unelected, self-appointed religious authority rather than to the citizens they govern. The American separation of church and state was designed precisely to prevent that. And it is under sustained, sophisticated, very well-funded attack.

Transcript

Episode 6: Faith as Certainty — A Complicated and Consequential History

This episode is about the difference between faith held humbly and faith turned into a weapon. The difference matters enormously, and our public conversation collapses the two constantly. So I want to draw the line carefully before I make the harder argument.

I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I do not know whether there is a God, or some form of transcendence the word God gestures toward — and I distrust the certainty of anyone, believer or atheist, who claims that they do.

I begin there because this episode is going to be hard on religion, and I want to be exact about what I am and am not saying. I am not arguing that religious faith is inherently harmful. I am not arguing that people of faith are intellectually deficient, or that religious experience is meaningless.

I was raised Catholic. I attended church. I said prayers. I also experienced the sense of community held together by shared commitment, and heard people articulate a vision of human dignity and mutual obligation that was genuine and inspiring. I do not dismiss those experiences or reduce them to mere social psychology.

But the faith that produced them is categorically different from the faith this episode examines. I am not writing against faith held humbly — faith held with the tentativeness appropriate to questions that transcend human knowledge, faith that produces a commitment to human dignity rather than a defense of hierarchy. I am writing against the weaponization of faith. The political deployment of religious certainty to override the rights of people who do not share it.

The history of Christianity in America is a history of one tension. Between the prophetic tradition that calls the powerful to account for their treatment of the vulnerable, and the priestly tradition that legitimates existing power by blessing it. Both are present in the Christian scriptures. The question is which is more influential now.

Jemar Tisby, in his history of American Christianity and race, The Color of Compromise, documents how the mainstream of white American Christianity chose, again and again, the priestly over the prophetic. Accommodating slavery rather than opposing it. Accommodating segregation rather than opposing it. Accommodating the political subjugation of women rather than opposing it.

This is not the whole of the tradition. The prophetic strand has been alive throughout — in the abolitionist clergy, in the civil rights movement, in liberation theology. But the mainstream has tended to accommodate power rather than challenge it.

The current moment is a continuation of that pattern. The mainstream of white American evangelical Christianity has aligned itself with a political movement that is, at its core, about maintaining existing hierarchies — of gender, of race, of sexual orientation — against the evidence that those hierarchies are harmful. The theological language is genuinely religious. The politics it produces are not the politics of the prophetic tradition. They are the politics of the priestly tradition. The blessing of power.

I am not a theologian. I cannot adjudicate the internal debate within Christianity about which strand is more authentic.

What I can do — what any honest observer can do — is note that the political agenda of Christian nationalism is causing specific, documentable harm to specific, identifiable people. And that “because God says so” is not a sufficient justification for that harm in a pluralistic democracy. The claim to speak for God is a human claim, made by human beings with human interests, and subject to the same standard of evidence as any other claim about the world.

Some of the most important work of the civil rights movement was carried out by deeply religious people whose faith animated a courageous commitment to justice. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister. The Black churches that organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge were not acting despite their faith. They were acting because of it.

My argument is not that believers should abandon their faith. It is that faith, however sincere, does not constitute a fact. And the laws governing all of us must be grounded in evidence all of us can examine, not in supernatural claims only the faithful can access.

With that said: the history of institutional religion as a tool of oppression is not ambiguous.

For millennia, the most powerful institutions in the Western world were religious institutions. The rules of law were said to originate directly from God, and were therefore presented as incontestable. Of course, they were interpreted and modified as the men in power saw fit.

The biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has documented the profound contradictions within the New Testament Gospels — and the historically established fact that those Gospels were written anonymously, decades after the events they describe, by authors who were not eyewitnesses. The uncertainty at the very foundation of Christian doctrine has been almost entirely suppressed, in the name of maintaining the certainty the institution required.

By the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church had become the first global organization to formally authorize the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Doctrine of Discovery, issued by Pope Nicholas the Fifth in a series of papal decrees beginning in 1452, declared that European Christian monarchies had the God-ordained right to conquer, claim, and enslave the peoples of any lands not already ruled by Christians. That doctrine authorized the invasion of the Americas, the destruction of Indigenous civilizations, the seizure of their lands, the forcible conversion or enslavement of their populations. It was cited as legal precedent by the United States Supreme Court as recently as 2005. The Catholic Church did not formally revoke it until 2023.

The Doctrine of Discovery was not presented as a policy decision. It was presented as the will of God. That is not incidental to its power. It is the source of its power.

A policy decision can be argued with. A divine mandate cannot. This is the fundamental difference between evidence-based governance and faith-based governance. One is, in principle, subject to debate, revision, and reversal. The other is not. And that difference — between a law that can be challenged and a law that cannot — is the distance between democracy and theocracy.

The same pattern repeats. Southern churches in the antebellum United States did not merely acquiesce to slavery. Many provided its most eloquent theological defenses. After the Civil War, white churches in the South provided spiritual validation for the violent reimposition of racial hierarchy. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King reserved some of his sharpest words not for the Klan but for the white moderate church — the church, he wrote, more devoted to order than to justice.

The thread is not malice — though malice was certainly present. The thread is certainty. The certainty that the racial hierarchy was natural and God-ordained, that the suffering of enslaved people was part of a divine plan, that the order of things was not to be questioned by fallible human reason.

That certainty served a function. It resolved the cognitive dissonance of otherwise decent people who found themselves participating in systems of extraordinary cruelty. It provided exactly the psychological service that false certainty always provides. Comfort in the face of unbearable moral complexity.

I want to make this concrete in the present tense. Because the same logic is operating right now — quietly, institutionally — inside the medical system that most Americans turn to in crisis.

Four of the ten largest American hospital chains are now Catholic. As Catholic-affiliated hospitals have expanded, they have systematically restricted access to reproductive health services — contraception, sterilization, miscarriage management, end-of-life care. The directives governing this restriction are issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an all-male body, and they carry the force of theological certainty. The bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives require that whatever comes under the control of a Catholic institution be operated in full accord with the moral teaching of the Church. Theological certainty does not have a mechanism for weighing evidence about who is harmed.

The American Medical Association has documented the consequences in terms that are difficult to read without anger. Restricted access falls disproportionately on poor women and women in rural areas. There are documented cases of women in incomplete miscarriage told that the only hospital within fifty miles cannot legally help them — until the fetus is confirmed dead. Because a bishop said so. These mergers create a direct conflict between a physician’s professional ethics and institutional compliance.

This is what it looks like when supernatural certainty is allowed to govern evidence-based practice. A woman in labor. A physician trained at one of the great research universities of the world, bound by the Hippocratic oath, aware of exactly what needs to happen. A set of directives written by an all-male body of bishops, none of whom will ever be in that room, that says it cannot.

This is what every freedom- and democracy-loving American should fear. Not trans kids and wokeness, as conservative politicians endlessly insist. This. The quiet, institutional replacement of evidence-based medicine with theological compliance, in the very rooms where the most vulnerable people in our society go for help.

Now let me name what is happening in American law on the same trajectory. One of the quietest and most consequential shifts in American civil rights law has been the steady expansion of religious exemptions. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993, was originally written to protect minority religious communities from laws that didn’t anticipate them. It has since been turned, through a long string of lawsuits, into the legal mechanism by which religious organizations and individuals claim exemption from the civil rights laws the rest of us have to follow.

The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Burwell versus Hobby Lobby established that closely held corporations can claim religious exemptions from generally applicable laws — in that case, the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage to employees. The court’s 2023 decision in 303 Creative versus Elenis held that a web design company offering services to the public could refuse same-sex couples on religious grounds.

The cumulative effect is a two-tiered civil rights system. LGBTQ people and women have formal legal protections — and an expanding set of religious exemptions that hollow them out. The protections exist on paper. The exemptions are doing the work in practice.

Here is the part I want to be careful about. What the courts have done is take religious freedom — one value among many — and treat it as a trump card that overrides everyone else’s civil rights. That is not what religious freedom is supposed to be. And the founders were not naive about this. They had watched European states make a mess of theocracy. The Establishment Clause and the protection of free exercise were fundamentally the same instrument: religious freedom protected, but not weaponized into the freedom to govern other people’s lives by anyone’s particular faith. We are watching that distinction collapse.

The legal scholar Kate Andrias has described this trajectory as the privatization of civil rights. A legal regime in which religious conviction functions as a get-out-of-civil-rights-free card for any individual or institution willing to invoke it. LGBTQ people can be denied housing, employment, education, and medical care by any entity that can claim a religious basis for the denial. In each case, the religious freedom claim is made in the name of protecting sincere belief.

In each case, the actual effect is to use the law to impose the costs of that belief on people who do not share it. This is the structural logic of faith-based governance. The beliefs of some are allowed to define the rights available to others.

There is a response, and it has to operate at multiple levels. Pass laws — like the Equality Act and the Women’s Health Protection Act, both of which have cleared the House and been blocked in the Senate — that provide explicit protections not subject to the same religious-exemption logic. Elect judges who understand the balance the founders actually struck. And in every conversation, refuse to accept “because my religion says so” as a sufficient reason to deny equal treatment to a neighbor, a customer, or a student.

Those legislative failures are not the product of public opinion — polls show majority support. They are the product of a structural feature of American democracy that lets a minority block what majorities want. This is the democratic crisis nested inside the epistemological one.

Then there is Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration. Unlike most political documents, it states its premises openly. Its vision of the good society is explicitly theological — a society built around “God’s design for humanity,” with family structure, gender roles, and sexual expression all ordered according to a specific interpretation of Christian teaching. It calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, the restructuring of the CDC, and the gutting of regulations protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage president, wrote in the foreword: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That is not the language of democratic governance. That is the language of religious nationalism. And it places the condition for bloodlessness on the people being revolutionized against, not on the people doing the revolutionizing. That is the grammar of a coup.

The manufactured doubt at the heart of Project 2025 is the claim that this program represents a return to natural or traditional values rather than the imposition of a specific ideological agenda. But the natural order it proposes to restore is not natural. It is a historically contingent arrangement of power, naturalized through the cultural authority of a particular religious tradition.

Every expansion of rights in American history has felt transgressive to someone. The abolition of slavery. The enfranchisement of women. The recognition of same-sex marriage. Each felt, to the people defending the existing order, like a violation of something sacred. Each was, in fact, the correction of a historical error.

We have seen a preview of where this leads. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the professional judgment of public health officials was overridden, systematically and repeatedly, by political actors responding to a constituency whose certainty about God’s protection of the faithful conflicted with the evidence of epidemiology. Churches that insisted on holding in-person services despite evidence-based guidance did so on the basis of religious freedom claims, and the courts, in several instances, sided with them. That precedent establishes that religious certainty, when sufficiently organized, can override evidence-based public health guidance. And the architects of Project 2025 are explicitly building on it.

I am an engineer. In engineering, we have a concept called single point of failure — a component whose failure brings down the whole system. Faith-based governance is a single point of failure for democratic accountability. When the basis for a law is supernatural authority, there is no mechanism for accountability. You cannot argue with God. You cannot subject God to peer review. You cannot vote God out. A government that derives its authority from God is accountable only to the intermediaries who claim to speak for God — and in practice, those intermediaries are remarkably well-aligned with the interests of those already in power.

The history of every theocratic state in the modern world makes this point with painful clarity. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary government, which came to power promising justice and freedom from corrupt secular authority, has governed for four decades through a system in which religious law overrides democratic accountability. The Supreme Leader is not elected and cannot be removed by the electorate. I am not saying evangelical Christianity in America will produce an Iranian-style theocracy. I am saying the structural logic is the same: divine authority, interpreted by an elite, overriding democratic accountability. The American separation of church and state was designed precisely to prevent that. And it is under sustained, sophisticated, very well-funded attack.

Let me end where the good news is. The dissenters within institutional religion have always been there. The Catholic nuns who organized labor unions and were eventually suppressed by the Vatican. The liberation theologians of Latin America, condemned for insisting that the Gospel requires the preferential option for the poor. The priests and ministers who marched at Selma. The congregations that affirm transgender dignity today.

What unites them is not a liberal political agenda. It is a specific theological claim. That authentic faithfulness requires the extension of moral concern to those who are excluded by the comfortable certainties of the institutional church. That is faith I respect without reservation. That faith is not my enemy. It is my ally. The inclusive churches that today affirm the dignity of LGBTQ people and stand against racial injustice are not betraying Christianity. They are insisting on a form of it that cannot be turned into a weapon. They have already done the internal work of distinguishing between faith as personal inspiration and faith as political domination. They know the difference from the inside. And they know the cost of ignoring it.

The country a faith-as-governance settlement produces is, in the end, not the country anyone living in it actually wants. The question is how close we are to building that country anyway — and how much of the country we already have we are willing to lose before the question stops being academic. The inclusive, humble faith is the kind this series is in alliance with. The other kind, the manufactured kind, is the one I am asking you to recognize and refuse.