I think about religion quite a bit for many reasons, including the role religion played in my childhood, my time in Divinity school, and one of my current roles as a volunteer in a local church. I can’t seem to get away from it, and don’t really want to, for whatever opinion I have of any religion, religious understanding (and often misunderstandings) guides much of our personal lives and public discourse.

My background is in Christianity. I was raised in a fundamentalist church. I began to slowly move away from my fundamentalist leanings during my high school years. I had begun to suspect that my world was not nearly as black and white as I had been told, but I couldn’t quite shake my youthful understanding. As with many things, the first few steps were the most difficult. One reason I was reluctant to change course is that I was tormented by thoughts of hell, believing that if I didn’t conform exactly to the religion I had been prescribed that I was in terrible danger of spending my postmortem days in the smoking section.

Another problem I had was that my religious education had been extraordinarily narrow. Though I began to have ideas about what I didn’t believe, I was unaware of a reasonable alternative. I remained conflicted for years, too frightened to give up the security of what I no longer believed.

There was also the issue of reputation. My father, who has now been dead for almost twenty years, was a fundamentalist Christian and a deacon in our church. My childhood world was filled with people who idealized his lifestyle and beliefs, and I was afraid I would let them/him down if I veered off the proper path. And I didn’t want to ruin my own reputation as a strong Christian. My friends would be disappointed, and I would be ashamed.

I was at war with myself, struggling to convince myself of things I simply could no longer believe, trying to direct my thoughts toward the convictions of my youth. And I was losing my mind. I was fighting so hard to concentrate on what I was supposed to believe that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Classes, once routine, became onerous. I simply couldn’t focus. Routine homework assignments took hours.

There’s a rather long story here, but the short version is that I eventually simply had to give up. I finally let go of all the nonsense in my head. I did it because the alternative was killing me. I didn’t know what the end result would be. I didn’t have a whole lot of answers, but I simply couldn’t go on trying to carry such a heavy burden.

I had been afraid that once I let doubt creep in that all the dominoes would begin to fall. I was right. They have. But I was wrong to fear that process. What I didn’t know then was that instead of developing the strength of my faith, the religion of my childhood destroyed it. I had been taught to hold onto a system of beliefs. That system failed, and I was left with nothing. Faith is nothing like that. As Alan Watts points out in The Wisdom of Insecurity, contrary to popular understanding, faith and belief are more nearly antonyms than synonyms. A healthy faith is one in which beliefs come and go freely, for belief is about holding on, while faith entails the ability to let go.

In the high school Sunday school class in which I currently take part, we are discussing the idea of church: what it is, what it should be, what it can be, what we want it to be, etc. It strikes me that of the church’s many failures, one of its most critical is its emphasis on belief over faith. We went over some statistics a couple of weeks ago about the decline in church attendance and religious belief of college students. I heard similar statistics when I was a high school senior. It didn’t surprise me then. It doesn’t surprise me now.

One of the most dramatic periods of change in modern American life takes place in college experience. We live in a new place, meet new friends, become more independent, are taught new things, etc. Much of our social life is thrown into total upheaval. So why should our religious experience be any different?

If church leaders are concerned about making a lasting impact on the lives of their members, they must emphasize faith over belief, for the latter can and must change. Instead of worrying about “losing” high school students as they venture out into the world (if college can be called that), we must trust (God forbid) that their faith journey will continue. But the tricky part is this: it will change. What our young people believe should change. To work toward or hope for anything else belies our own faith.

To expect a person’s beliefs to remain the same throughout one’s life is both ridiculous and unhealthy. It is akin to expecting the peoples of the world to also maintain ideological stagnation. No one walks around declaring that the earth is flat and the center of the universe. As our collective understanding changes over time, so does that of the individual. Stifling that growth betrays the evolution of human understanding and decries any sort of real faith.