Belief seems so foundational to faith that it’s hard to imagine a more central feature. The religious person is frequently described, in fact, as a believer. 

However, there is a compelling alternative understanding of why and how people belong to a faith. Hope, I suggest, does better than belief in expressing one’s deepest religious commitments. As St. James famously observed, even demonic forces may believe that there is a God, while finding this fact terrifyingly disappointing. The one who hopes, however, sincerely wants the core claim to be true— that God exists, for example, or that justice will roll down like a river, or that all will be well—even if it is presently hard to believe.

Shifting from an emphasis on belief to an emphasis on hope can expand access to the goods of religious life while also mitigating its risks. This shift will be especially beneficial for serious doubters; but it will well serve comfortable believers, too.

To see the value of the shift from belief to hope, let’s start by getting clearer about what we mean by hope. Scholars who focus on the nature of hope have been especially busy over the past decade or so, as you can see from this recent research overview. While the field is still developing, there is a remarkable amount of agreement about the following two points.

First, you can hope that something is true without believing that it is true. For example, you might hope that your beloved local baseball team will win the World Series, despite their poor performance thus far, even though your confidence that they will do so is far too low to be something you sincerely believe. Or, more significantly, you might hope that a new civil rights act will pass even though you think the evidence is too weak to support your belief that it will. 

Second, hoping is more than wishing. To hope that something is true is at least to want it to be true, to believe it is possible that it is true, and to be willing to act on this possibility in some ways. You might act on the possibility of your baseball team’s success by buying tickets to games and by joining the collective chanting in its support. You might act on the possibility of the passage of the new civil rights legislation by participating in targeted voter registration efforts and by planning to cast your own vote in its favor. 

Let’s see, then, how hope can help with religious commitment.

Serious Doubt and Not Getting Out

We can start with those in religious communities whose pervasive doubts about the truth of the core claims of their tradition have them seriously considering leaving religious life. 

We know that the number of such people is not small. Each new sociological report on North American religion confirms the growth of the “nones” and the general decline of religious belief and practice. As we might expect, the decline in religious belief and the decline in religious practice seem to be connected. According to a recent study conducted by the Public Research Religious Institute, 67% of respondents who had left their religious communities indicated that their departure was due to loss of belief. As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has aptly put it, many are moving “from doubt to getting out.”

As natural as this movement is, serious doubters may want to resist it. Leaving a faith community can involve losing some deep goods that are hard to replace. Getting out will not, after all, be cost-free. 

First, consider the loss of moral support. The enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant, who had plenty of complaints about organized religion, was nevertheless committed to the idea that a certain kind of “church” is important for living a morally serious life. What he saw was how hard it is for us to stay dedicated to our own moral values. 

For such dedication, we need reminders of the values we endorse. We also need encouragement when doing the right thing will be hard—and support after our inevitable moral failures. Yet outside of religious communities, these needs often go unmet. Unless you’re in a very unusual bowling league, the odds of getting honest moral encouragement between beers and gutter balls is low. 

A second loss faced by those who leave their religious communities has to do with the sad fact that we are all eventually going to die. Unlike ordinary forms of social engagement, religious communities come ready-made with structures and rituals that make death and dying more meaningful and tolerable. 

These communities have been supporting the “art of dying” (ars moriendi), as the medievals called it, for countless generations. Our families of faith offer liturgies and rites that allow us to experience death, whether our own or of a loved one, as a meaningful and natural part of life. These traditions also give us the words to say, in the form of prayers, poetry, and song, when the presence of death threatens to dumbfound us. 

A third loss regards our need for simple social engagement. It is reasonable to worry that the depersonalizing powers of technology, when combined with the widespread decline of religious practice, is ushering in a new era of social isolation. The U.S. Surgeon General has gone as far as to warn that we face “an epidemic of loneliness.”

Amid this epidemic—and given how hard it is to establish new friendships in adult life—we would do well to be cautious about cutting ourselves off from long-standing communal connections. In a church or synagogue or mosque, participants have built rich and supportive relationships with people who know their names and who will keep them from bowling or drinking alone. 

Do I Stay Or Do I Go?

What serious doubters may be very naturally feeling, though, is that their loss of belief requires them, on pain of a kind of inconsistency, to get out. Even when the practical costs of getting out of religious life are high, it can feel disingenuous to continue in a community when belief in its core tenets has waned. There is something morally and intellectually respectable in this pull to preserve integrity by leaving the community under these conditions.

But if we pivot from the primacy of belief to an emphasis on hope, serious doubters can maintain their integrity in religious practice as long as they can still hope that the core tenets of their religion are true. Hope can ground an authentic religious practice. 

Suppose our doubters are finding it hard to believe that the God of their religious tradition really exists. Fair enough. Do they still want this God to exist? And do they think it is possible (even if very unlikely) that this God exists? If they can answer yes to these questions, then they might also, and in all reasonableness, be willing to act accordingly. They might, for example, participate in a sacrament or offer up tentative prayers to this God whom they sincerely hope exists. 

With hope, then, serious doubt need not lead to getting out.

Comfortable Belief and the Value of Hope

What about our comfortable believers? Can reframing religious commitment in terms of hope do anything for those who are not facing pervasive doubts? 

Well, one initial point to make here is that today’s comfortable believer may very well be tomorrow’s serious doubter. It is hard to know just what will provoke those serious doubts and when they might fall upon us. So, the role of hope in supporting the religious commitment of the serious doubters may also turn out to be good for those who currently possess strong convictions.

And even if our generally comfortable believers never find themselves facing persistent and pervasive doubts, it is only very rare people who will avoid at least some punctuated moments of loss of confidence in one or another core claim of their religious community. Hope will allow them to make it through these episodes without engaging in psychologically grueling and morally dubious efforts to make themselves believe things that don’t seem to them, in the present moment, to be true. Since religious commitment can be grounded in hope, our tentative doubters do not have to fear the momentary loss of belief. 

Additionally, by emphasizing hope, the comfortable believer should feel a deeper kinship with hopeful members who struggle with their faith. The emphasis on hope, then, promises to enrich our religious communities with a more authentic camaraderie, no matter how firmly or tentatively one’s beliefs are held. 

Another positive outcome of this reframing can come from a renewed attitude of openness and intellectual humility. Religious communities that emphasize propositional belief often face forms of insularity and narrowness that close its participants off from a healthy freedom of thought and inquiry. If hope is seen as more fundamental than belief, however, the community can be set free to entertain a variety of ideas and engage in critical reflection without inordinate concern to police the borders of orthodoxy. Of course, our religious communities will still want to define themselves in terms of their distinctive commitments—but to the degree that these commitments are expressed by hopes, they can be held with less dogmatism and with greater responsiveness to honest scrutiny. 

Comfortable belief can, then, be enriched by a shift to an emphasis on hope. 

Hope and Truth

Some will no doubt be worried that in centralizing hope our religious communities will lose a dedication to the truth of their claims. But consider two points that could soften this worry. 

First, data from the psychology of religion indicates a substantive correlation between reflectiveness and unbelief. That is, those who incline towards critical reflection and scrutiny are statistically more likely to find it hard to believe religious claims. When people leave religious communities because of their doubts, it’s not unlikely that the communities are losing their critical thinkers, too. With an emphasis on hope over belief, these religious communities are more likely to keep their reflective members. 

Second, hopers who are presently unable to believe are more likely to overcome the obstacles to belief from inside the community than from outside of it. If the tenets of the religion are true, the evidence of their truth will best be found in the ongoing conversations within the community, in participation in sacramental life, and in the regular inputs of thoughtful teaching. 

Centralizing hope, then, is compatible with seriousness about truth–and promises to be good for entire faith communities.