Why We Trust Others
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Due to time restraints caused by my moving out-of-state, Skeptical Faith blogs for the next few weeks will be, as they say in show biz, "encore presentations." This one was published in 2021.
Some conservatives wouldn’t be caught dead reading the New York Times. Some liberals wouldn’t watch Fox News if their lives depended on it.
More
and more, we seem to be caught in a morass of conflict, seemingly arising from
seeing the same reality in two startlingly different ways. And a lot of it, I
believe, has to do with a lack of trust, which is both the cause and effect of
the conflict.
And
it’s not just in politics. The lack of trust is present in families, churches,
businesses, the military, the police – in virtually every sector of life. We
increasingly judge each other according to our wildly different perceptions of
reality.
How
We Feel
David
Brooks, the New York Times columnist who was considered a conservative until
the Trump era, believes it’s not so much a matter of what we think we know as
how we feel, arising from an irrational distrust of one another.
“The
collapse of trust, the rise of animosity — these are emotional, not
intellectual problems,” he wrote in a recent column. “The real problem is in
our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in
which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people
toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.”
Say
what you will about sharing narratives and stories, and shared political
ideologies, I believe contemporaries’ indifference toward God and religion, and
the consequent absence of hope, is partly to blame.
Both
of these views are traditionally religious ways of seeing the world that are
alternatives to one that views human life as an absurdity, one that says we
struggle through a meaningless rat race in a cold, indifferent universe, facing
oblivion at the end. 
Timothy Radcliffe
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In
his book, “What’s the Point of Christianity,” British theologian Timothy
Radcliffe tells of his first visit to the museum at Auschwitz, the famous
concentration camp of Nazi Germany. He notes that the place was filled by young
people from around the world who had made a pilgrimage there to remember the
camp’s victims.
Visiting
a place like Auschwitz, he writes, “is a pilgrimage that places the greatest
challenge to our hoping.
“The
Church was born in a crisis of hope.” (“But we had hoped that he was the one to
redeem Israel,” said the disciples to an unrecognized Jesus on the road to
Emmaus.) “Crises are (our specialty). They rejuvenate us. The one that we are
living through now is very small.”
Radcliffe
also recalls the gospel story of Jesus, appearing to be weak and vulnerable,
before Pontius Pilate, who asked Jesus, “Do you not know that I have the power
to release you, and the power to crucify you?” It reminded Radcliffe of the
more modern version of Pilate, Josef Stalin, who cynically asked, “The Pope?
How many divisions does he have?”
Little
More Than a Footnote
Ironically,
Pontius Pilate is little more than a footnote in history, and Stalin is now
considered to be a god in the pantheon of evil dictators. Jesus is considered
by billions to be the Savior of mankind.
In
the absence of the hope provided by religious belief, we are prisoners of a
world dominated by the quest for stuff, power and prestige. In such a world,
why would we trust others – especially those others who see the world in a
light different from ours?
Radcliffe
quotes Vaclav Havel, playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, who
said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the
certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it will turn out.”
Jesus,
he writes, represents “the ultimate and unimaginable victory of meaning.”
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