On Intentionality

Part 2, Faith as Choice

In the last post I described how I’ve made calls for intentionality. From enchantment to hospitality to our mental health, I’ve argued that our default and unreflective postures toward the world have negative impacts. Our “autopilot” response toward life facilitates disenchantment, poorer mental health, and failures of hospitality.

And yet, intentionality isn’t without it critics. Especially when it comes to faith. To illustrate some of this criticism of intentionality, I want to borrow the analysis from Peter Berger and Anton Zinderveld in their 2009 book In Praise of Doubt.

In their book, Berger and Zinderveld take aim at what has been called “secularization theory.” The basic claim of secularization theory is that as modernity advances people give up religious belief and become “secular.” A classic account of secularization theory was Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. Freud argued that as humanity “grows up” and “develops” we would give up our primitive mythological beliefs. In our lifetimes, secularization theory was the sermon preached by the New Atheists during their high water mark in the mid-2000s.

But as many social scientists have pointed out, empirically speaking, secularization theory has been falsified. Modernity hasn’t run faith out of the building. Faith remains very much with us.

What has happened in modernity, argue Berger and Zinderveld, is not secularization but plurality. What we see around us isn’t a binary choice between faith and unfaith. Rather, it’s choices between faiths, unbelief among them, along with the bespoke, DIY, mixing and matching we find among the spiritual but not religious. What characterizes modernity is the radical range of choices now in front of us. Faith hasn’t been eliminated from modern life. Rather, faith has become radically open. The options available to us are dizzying. We live in the wake of what Charles Taylor calls “the Nova Effect,” an explosive expansion of choices, worldviews, and lifestyles.

Berger and Zinderveld explain how this happened in the following way. According to secularization theory the shift that was predicted to occur was this:

faith to unfaith

But what really has happened in modernity was this:

the-world-taken-for-granted to choice

To understand this shift we need to grasp some sociological terminology. Sociologists distinguish between the background and the foreground of human culture and cognition. The aspects of life that are assumed, instinctive, unconscious, and taken for granted function in the background of life. Rarely do I reflect upon or evaluate these background structures of my life. In contrast to this background, the foreground of life is the location of choice, reflection, and decision making.

Consider the following example given by Berger and Zinderveld to illustrate the point. When I wake up in the morning I have to decide what I want to wear. These considerations are in the foreground of my life. I reflect and make choices about what clothes to put on. However, I never really question the assumption that I will be wearing something. Leaving the house with clothes on is assumed. It functions in the background.

The point here is that a great deal of life is regulated to the background where my worldview hums away, largely unnoticed. And this makes good adaptive sense. As Berger and Zinderveld note, if 100% of life was up for grabs, in the foreground, we would be cognitively and socially crippled. Everything would be a matter of conscious reflection and deliberate choice. Consequently, some things just have to be assumed.

With these understandings in place we can describe how modernity has affected us. Modernity has increased the foreground relative to the background. That is, things that used to be assumed and taken for granted have now moved into the foreground and have become objects of choice and reflection. Think about the choices you face that your forebears 500 years ago didn’t even consider:

What should I do with my life?

What career should I pursue—and should I change it later?

Where should I live? In what kind of community?

Should I marry? When? Should I stay married?

How many children—if any—should I have?

What kind of education do I want for myself or my family?

What political views should I hold?

What moral values should guide my life?

What do I believe about God, the soul, and the afterlife?

Should I be Christian, another religion, or “spiritual but not religious”?

If Christian, should I be Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—or none of these?

What church—or kind of church—should I belong to?

What does it mean to live a good life?

In the not so distant past many if not all of the answers to these questions were taken for granted, they were in the background. Culture carried your worldview and determined your beliefs and actions. People 500 years ago didn’t worry about what their college major should be or if they should change careers. People 500 years ago didn’t worry about if or when they would marry. Nor could they use birth control to determine how many kids they would have. And, importantly for our purposes, people 500 years ago didn’t think about what religion they would adopt. All this was taken for granted.

In short, modernity didn’t undermine the contents of religious belief. What modernity changed was the location of belief in the mind. Specifically, faith moved from the background to the foreground. From taken-for-granted to an object of choice. Here’s a visual of the change, the left side portraying the location of faith in the mind 500 years ago versus the right side portraying the location of faith in the mind today:

Given that faith is now a choice we observe faith increasingly becoming an individual lifestyle decision, a form of personal expression. This creates the explosion of the Nova Effect, the ramifying diversity of faith in the modern world where everyone follows their own path. When faith was a cultural given, a part of the taken-for-granted background, it created homogeneous conformity. You were born into a tradition and learned it like your native language. Unbelief just wasn’t an option. Faith wasn’t a choice, it was given. Today, however, with faith in the foreground of individual choice, there is no way to keep everyone on the same page. Homogeneity and conformity gives way to heterogeneous diversity. A unified tradition becomes a pluralistic marketplace.

Beyond the Nova Effect, faith has also become more fragile and unstable. Just like everything in my life that sits in the foreground as the object of choice and decision. No longer taken for granted, faith-as-choice is always exposed and re-exposed to reflection and revisitation. More, as a choice faith must be reasserted, like all our other choices, over and over again. Like waking up every morning and deciding what to wear. Instead of a givenness where I can find rest within, faith has become a perpetual effort of will.

All this has implications for how we respond to the modern call for intentionality. Intentionality assumes a framework of choice: We choose to be intentional. And while that choice can foster a sense of purpose and self-ownership, it also makes faith provisional and effortful. For if faith depends upon our decisions, then we can just as easily decide otherwise. And decision, by its nature, is work. We grow weary rather than finding rest.

And beyond this weariness and fragility there is also the drift into pluralistic self-expression.

I hope you can see the concern here. Simply put, the call to intentionality is often presented as the cure for modernity’s ailments. But it may be part of the illness itself. In a world where everything is determined by individual choice, being “intentional” about those choices is the only kind of advice we can offer. Yet such advice never touches the deeper sickness.