The Nameless God

I came across a quote the other day that has stayed with me since. It’s from Napoleon, late in life, in exile on the island of St. Helena:

"A man cannot become an atheist simply by wishing it."

It's hard to pin Napoleon down on religion. He used it cynically throughout his military career, giving fulsome praise to Islam in his Egyptian campaigns, to Catholicism when he conquered Italy, and so on. He once said that if he had to worship any God, it would be the sun, and he went to his death doubting that Jesus Christ was even a real historical figure. Nevertheless, the atheism quote stuck with me, because in some small way it accurately describes a part of my journey with the concept of God. I'm 42 now, and I feel that I've settled into my final belief, but there was a time when atheism would have been either fashionable or at least self-flattering to adopt, because it seemed to be the default stance of a certain kind of intellectual—the whip-smart, hyper-literate, funny, dismissive (mostly) men who, with devastating wit, pointed out the hypocrisies of organized religion.

Like Napoleon, I never quite got there. For a long time I would call myself an "agnostic," a fancy term for addressing all questions of God and the afterlife with an unapologetic "I have no idea.” It felt like the only honest avenue, and increasingly both religious people and atheists seemed arrogant in their certainty, in assuming they had any clue how the universe ran. I explained it to myself with an analogy: If I were asked to name a number between one and a trillion, with endless decimals in play, I should never expect to get it right, while the believers and nonbelievers behaved as though they had known the number since birth. Even that didn’t quite explain the leap, though, because you could get lucky in guessing a number; the story of the world is a narrative, so the true analogy would be attempting to write a 500-page novel from scratch and expecting it to be the same, word for word, as a book you've never read and that covers subjects you can't conceive of.

Intellectually, this still feels like the "right" stance, but to take Napoleon's quote a step further, you also can't become agnostic simply by wishing it. Over the last few years, I've realized that no matter what solution presents itself as the most logical in my brain, my relationship with the divine is a matter of the heart, and the heart has a lot more influence than I ever expected. I am not a cold, clinical thinker, nor do I especially want to be, and now I'm too old to care if anybody else sees me that way.

Which leads to my "cards on the table" moment. My governing belief may be a kind of hybrid of agnosticism and theism: I believe in God, but I don't know what form God takes. In the title of this piece, I've called that entity "The Nameless God," but in fact that's looking at it from a very egocentric position—God is only nameless to me, but not to itself. The more accurate but less memorable term would be "The God whose name I don't know."

There are so many explanations for what our creator could be, some of them beautiful, some of them terrifying, and some that are beyond our understanding. I speak in the singular, but of course if I'm right that God exists, the idea of a singular being could be miles from the truth.

What I have to reconcile in my own brain are the opposed ideas of A, having an instinctual conception of what God is, and B, thinking of that God as unknowable. I don't know if I've squared that circle yet, but all I can say is that I feel certain values have been communicated to me in ways both concrete and mysterious, and innately I feel a sense of how to conduct myself in a way that adheres to my idea of God’s path. Many of those values you could go read today in any major religious text—they are universal, and I take their ubiquity in religion and law as a sign of God's presence and influence in the world. And when it comes to obeying them, I have fallen short in many ways, especially when adherence requires great courage or sacrifice.

Increasingly I have started to think of life as some kind of test, some kind of audition for an afterlife I can't begin to imagine. This would explain why we don't find instant justice on Earth, why the goodness of man and the influence of God seems often very subtle and mysterious and in conflict with pervasive cruelty on both an individual and state level. It may be inevitable that I've arrived at the life-as-test idea because it allows me to marry the beauty and power I sense in God with the dire state of things in the world; like many others, I have struggled with the old question of how a divine goodness co-exists with worldly suffering, and the concept of life as a trial suggests itself as a possible answer. There is hope in me, too, that this belief will gird me and provide purpose for what’s to come. Even as a relatively lucky person in my life experience to date, who has not suffered anywhere near the pain and deprivations of others, I understand this suffering is guaranteed as part of my human condition. How I'll suffer is a mystery, but that I will suffer is certain.

There is an awkwardness to this discussion, because like all Americans, I interact closely with Christians. I respect their beliefs, and for many of them I respect how they arrived there and the intelligent thought they put into the process, but discussions like these always reach a point where I have to frankly admit that I believe all human religions are based on stories invented by people who were trying to guess at the hardest question we'll ever have to answer. And because I believe you can't definitively answer that question on Earth, I doubt the veracity of them all. (Where they point to history as a basis for the stories, I run up against the fallibility of even recent history, much less ancient.) Christianity is a major part of many people’s lives, so what I’m writing now must feel like a refutation at best and insulting at worst. I don't see a great way around this beyond a mutual respect and a mutual belief in our own good intentions.

There are elements of organized religion that have stopped bothering me with time, and it eases the conflict at least in my own mind. I no longer put any stock in the idea of religion’s responsibility for war and conquest and oppression. The more I learn about the world, the more I know that these matters stem from the urge for power and money and conquest, and religion only serves as a justification. It's an effective one, at times, but so is nationality or ethnicity, and if religion weren't around, the power impulse would find another way. Religion is not a central actor in this drama, just an occasionally useful tool, and in my mind it shouldn't shoulder the blame for world conflict.

Similarly, religious hypocrisy on the individual level—living in conflict with your stated beliefs—no longer strikes me as very noteworthy. It exists, but just like war, hypocrisy is inherent to the human condition, and even on the broader level when religion serves as a means of consolidating groups of people into tribes, and excluding or persecuting outsiders, I find this also to be an inevitable product of our behavior, and religion merely a tool that could be replaced (and often is replaced) with another.

I cover American athletes for a living, so it happens that I'm often thinking about God in the context of these men. And while I still cringe at the worst displays of messianic messaging in post-game interviews, I've tried to understand them on their level. Will Leitch, the founder of Deadspin, once wrote of athletes that, "they don’t thank Jesus for helping them win a game; they thank Jesus for everything. What sounds like mealy-mouthed platitudes to us are genuine, heartfelt beliefs for them." Now, that's all fine until you have someone like Riley Leonard who offered this quote on Ohio State and Notre Dame meeting in the college football championship: "I truly believe that Jesus was looking over both our shoulders throughout the who season and put these two teams on a pedestal for a reason." There’s no spinning that one—it sounds to me like he believes Jesus helped them win football games in order to market a religion. But I also think it's a mistake to judge any group by one person, and it's probably also a mistake to judge a young person like Riley Leonard by this one quote. Even if many Christian athletes do think they are chosen specifically by God for success, this again we can attribute to human vanity rather than pinning the blame on religion.

In other words, I think the ugly aspects of religion are actually ugly aspects of humanity that would be ugly in the same exact way even without religion, while the beautiful aspects represent our attempts to pursue a set of values that end up being universal to anyone seeking God, and are therefore worthy on their merits. If they arrive within the messaging of an organized religion with a foundational story I don't believe, this doesn't bother me; I look at the story as ornamentation, and in that way I no longer have to think of religion in complete opposition to my beliefs. At our best, we arrive at God by different paths.

I also think it's true that the people and the art and the acts that have resonated with God's presence in our world have most often been associated with organized religion. To take an historical example that has always moved me, consider Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican who led a political hunger strike in 1981. Catholicism was central to the beliefs of Sands and the nine other prisoners who starved themselves to death for their cause. It's not a cause you have to agree with, but the sheer strength of that act is profound, and I'm sure it wouldn't have been possible without their faith.

Considering that long tradition of faith being attached to religion, I've often wondered if I should just attach my own faith to Catholicism, the religion of my birth, and use it as a structure from which to explore my belief in God, even if I don't believe in the fundamental stories of the religion itself. I suspect a lot of people make that compromise, and maybe the day is coming when I will too. It does seem easier in a few critical ways. For now, though, it feels dishonest to my own thoughts and my own experience. I don’t yet want to reject the mystery.

Which leaves me with the profound beauty of the God whose name I don't know, and the faith that God’s subtle presence communicates the standard to which I should aspire, and that where I fall short of the standard there is disappointment, and where I meet the standard there is transcendence. This is the God I believe in, the God I believe I have felt in the world and in me, and the God I want to follow and to serve.