A Nonbeliever Grapples with Self-Sacrifice

Recently, I went to Catholic Mass for the first time in nearly a decade. At the lines of the Nicene Creed that describe the incarnation of Jesus, I felt tears in my eyes. “For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.” The notion of an omniscient, infinite God becoming a fragile mortal body for the express purpose of suffering and dying for others’ sins is at odds with all common sense. This story has been told for two thousand years, but its inversion of how we expect power to behave remains subversive, even shocking.

I am not a believing Christian. My relationship with the church, and with faith generally, is long and complicated, though not hostile. I was born into a Catholic family, baptized as an infant, and grew up going to weekly Mass with my parents and grandparents. I also attended Sunday catechism classes during the school year. As a child, I was a fervent believer in what my philosophical training now leads me to call “the core metaphysical truth claims” of Catholic Christianity. I immersed myself in the teachings, rituals, and sacraments of the church, peppering my catechism teachers with questions about Jesus’ miracles, the lifespans of biblical patriarchs, and whether the creation story in Genesis was to be interpreted literally.

Most of all, I was fascinated by the lives of the saints. The Acts of the Apostles was my favorite book of the Bible, and when I had exhausted its stories I pestered my parents for trips to the local Catholic goods store where I could find more books about saints’ lives. Their sacrifices, their willingness to forsake worldly comforts, even to face death so that others might be saved, moved me. Even as a believer, I was terrified of death: of the process, of whatever changes to the consciousness a human soul undergoes when its mortal body passes away. For that matter, I also didn’t do so well with routine discomforts, such as hunger between meals or too much time outside on hot summer days. The saints provided powerful examples of people putting others first, even when it cost them everything. These human-scale stories also helped me make sense of an all-loving God. It was his goodness and grace that allowed the saints to bear hardship and indignity in good humor. Their willingness to give up their own lives offered visceral hints of the immensity of Jesus’ sacrifice.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Carrying the Cross, oil on canvas, c. 1738. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

In seventh or eighth grade, my Christian faith, and belief in Catholic dogma, began to fall away. There was no inciting event; church and catechism class had generally been pleasant experiences, and I suffered no abuse, mistreatment, or feelings of alienation. Nonetheless, fewer and fewer of Christianity’s supernatural claims – the virgin birth, Jesus’ miracles, and most important, his resurrection – seemed plausible to me. As I approached eighteen, I told my parents that I did not want to receive the sacrament of confirmation. By this point, I was an atheist. Nonetheless, I felt strongly that to falsely affirm my faith in one of the Catholic Church’s most important ceremonies would be to degrade myself and disrespect the church and the sacrament. Honesty and reverence, it seemed, were real moral imperatives in spite of my professed strict materialism. My parents understood and respected my decision, which we discussed with Monsignor McGuire, my grandparents’ parish priest, who had known me since I was small. The monsignor listened thoughtfully and understood my reasoning. I was never confirmed.

All this brings us back to that Mass that I just went to. In adulthood, my strict materialism has softened, though I still do not believe in Christianity’s metaphysical truth claims, or those of any other religious tradition. I went to Mass not as one of the faithful, but as a respectful visitor who wanted to think about Jesus, about his life, teachings, and gift of self. I wanted to contemplate my own moral convictions, my ideas about the good and where they might come from. And I wanted to witness the celebration of Mass with someone I love. Sacrifice, moral reflection, togetherness: it seems there is much of value in churchgoing, even for an agnostic. This feeling only gets stronger when one thinks about our American culture’s bleaker elements: rampant self-interest, atomization, anomie. It is easy to feel like too many people are no longer willing to give of themselves for others. I worry about this. While transactionalism among equals and under fair rules can promote material well-being and peaceful co-existence, there are many areas of human life that do not conform well to market logic. Healthy communities and lasting relationships depend on a willingness to sacrifice at least some of the time. Maybe we need more settings in which to cultivate this generous impulse into habit. Maybe we could all use some church.

This is the point of view embraced by several prominent thinkers who might be termed “Christian civilizationists.” The actual religious beliefs of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson are ambiguous, but each has promoted Christianity as necessary for human flourishing and for healthy, free societies. Hirsi Ali, a former avowed atheist who has embraced Christian faith, describes it as the “operating system” on which the “apps” of society run. Peterson’s Jungian account of Christianity sees it as the “single great story” on which Western cultures were built. He celebrates the mythopoetic value of Christian stories for civilizational self-understanding, and for how they teach us to delay gratification and sacrifice narrow self-interest for others.

I find plenty to agree with here: undoubtedly, many religions teach valuable lessons that can help people live more moral lives. I particularly like Christianity’s emphasis on generosity and sacrifice. Having a community is good for people. Not only does it provide social contact and a sense of rootedness; it gives us a space to pursue shared projects with others, and hold each other accountable when we slip up. The knowledge that people are counting on us can make it harder to abandon responsibilities when we don’t feel like honoring them. In turn, we may start to trust that there are others who will be there to support us when we need it, regardless of whether it’s convenient for them to do so.

Though I share the Christian civilizationists’ concerns about hyperindividualism run amok, I recoil at their remedy. I cannot help but see professed non-Christians explicitly promoting re-Christianization for its civilizational benefits as cynical, even misanthropic. While I do not doubt the sincerity of these thinkers’ concern for others, their message is essentially that we – we wise few – may be able to build stable, virtuous, purposeful lives on our own, but the masses need their scaffolding. Religious community takes time and work to cultivate. Even if we care mainly about its social benefits, I doubt that many new churchgoers will put in the consistent effort necessary to reap these benefits – that is, to actually sacrifice – when their would-be evangelists openly suggest that it is after all only a useful fairy tale.

But there is a more important issue. Religion’s usefulness for cultivating generosity is only one of the two important things about it that I came to know through my ongoing spiritual questioning. The other is that there are real moral goods; among them are truth and treating people and things with their due reverence. Getting confirmed, professing a faith I did not share, would have been untruthful. In a small way, it would have demeaned beliefs around which devout people structure their lives and through which they hope for eternal life with God, a creed for which the saints were martyred. Christian civilizationism is noxious for the same reasons. It is indifferent to truth claims. It reduces Christianity to a scaffolding of stable societies and pro-social behavior.

Instrumentalizing religion this way is not just dishonest and disrespectful; it also risks causing harm. The history of crusades, religious civil wars, and legal persecutions shows that many of religion’s worst abuses are committed when faith is subordinated to earthly objectives. This is not surprising. As soon as religion is deployed in support of conquest, social cohesion, nationalism, or some other purpose, its own substance is eclipsed by these other ends. Contemporary examples are everywhere: Facebook memes claiming Christianity for some modern political faction (Jesus was brown, or a socialist, or a Palestinian refugee), or the Lord’s Prayer recited over images of war machines in a recruitment ad for the US military. Sure enough, many of the Christian civilizationists are now at least as fixated on a whatever-it-takes defense of a poorly defined “Western civilization” against perceived enemies within and without as they are concerned with persuading others to lead more Christian lives. A message of “first and foremost, protect what is yours” is clearly at odds with a spirit of sacrifice for others.

I reject Christian civilizationism for its misuse of religion, but I am still concerned about a hyperindividualist society. I found precedent for these worries in the writings of Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), the Swiss-French statesman, novelist, philosopher of liberalism, and amateur religious anthropologist. Constant, too, believed that religion and sacrifice go together. Even the earliest humans, Constant wrote, were capable of spiritual reflection. Something deep inside moved them to build idols and fetishes, and to share with these simple gods the fruits of their hunting and gathering. This primal draw to worship is the “religious sentiment,” an essential and indestructible feature of human nature. Through their religious practices, primitive humans cultivated awareness of their duties to others, whether divine or human. Across time and around the world, the religious sentiment raised humankind from “particular and self-regarding ideas,” inspiring in their place virtue, generosity, courage, and tenderness.

Constant was one of the first liberals to carry the label. He was a champion of freedom, which he viewed as essential to human development, and, believing commerce and war were opposing forces, preferred the circulation of goods and money to the passage of armies across borders. But, looking around at the societies that Enlightenment values, revolution, and Napoleonic conquest had left in their wake, he condemned ways of living based solely on self-interest, even self-interest “properly understood.” He saw a life based on self-interest as impoverished: beneath the nature, dignity, and ultimate purpose of human beings. Such ways of living, Constant argued, reduced men to “industrious beavers.”

In the end, according to Constant, there are only two moral systems: one driven by prudent self-interest and calculation, and the other by the capacity for sacrifice. The first system debases virtues like charity, compassion, and familial love by subordinating them to one’s own well-being. Worse, it threatens hard-won political liberty by encouraging self-centeredness, which breeds isolation and withdrawal from civic life. The second system, in contrast, is other-focused. Through the capacity for self-abnegation, virtuous actions can be carried out in their proper spirit, not as adjuncts to egoism. Engaged citizens can safeguard freedom and enlarge it through political participation. Human beings, attuned to the noble and the sublime, can pursue the moral improvement that Constant believed was their destiny.

The religious sentiment, the source of the self-sacrifice impulse, underpins Constant’s vision of the good society. Throughout On Religion, his magisterial study of the topic, he examines and compares historical religious traditions to better understand the religious sentiment and the circumstances under which it has flourished. Constant’s verdict, reflecting his belief in the German Romantic concept of “progressive revelation,” was that the religious sentiment is eternal and mysterious, but that it reveals itself and develops best in free societies, where people can contemplate it without the interference of a heavy-handed state or an exclusive, dogma-bound priestly caste. In other words, the religious sentiment both sustains liberal societies and, provided people take heed of it, can thrive in them.

Given Constant’s belief that the religious sentiment is necessary to sustain and ennoble free societies, along with his preference for Christianity, modern readers may be tempted to view him as a forerunner of today’s Christian civilizationists. But Peterson, Hirsi Ali, and their ilk are not Constant’s heirs, whatever points of agreement they might find on the civilizational benefits of widespread adherence to some form of Christianity. It is unclear to what extent Constant was a believing Christian, but he consistently argued against viewing religion as a mere tool for political reform. The religious sentiment inspires us to self-sacrifice and moral improvement, but at its heart is a yearning for metaphysical truth, for connection with whatever lies beyond the physical world. This is religion’s nature and purpose, and to restrict it to “material, and limited, usefulness” is to “lower it from its true rank.” For Constant, this is wrong on its own terms, offensive to religion’s “dignity, sanctity, and noblest influence.” At the same time as Constant warned against a morality grounded in self-interest, he furiously denounced calls to restore official ancien regime Catholicism from reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, who believed it was necessary for civilizational strength and social cohesion. Attempts by French Revolutionaries to create a civil religion through a “cult of reason” came in for similar criticism.

“Defend religious freedom, approach religion with reverence, and reject its instrumentalization” is advice we should all be glad to take. But while Constant avoids the errors of the Christian civilizationists, his account is short on details about how a widespread ethic of self-sacrifice, or self-gift, is to be cultivated. While the desire to give of ourselves for others is so nearly universal as to be called essentially human, it competes with more selfish impulses. If generosity is to win out, we must find ways to practice self-sacrifice until it becomes a stable part of our character. For sincere believers, transformation may come through religious observance and practice. The nonreligious, however, will need another source of inspiration and guidance. I think – I hope – we can find it in the same realization I had when I declined confirmation years ago: that there are real moral imperatives that anyone can discover through intuition, reason, and insight. We should not affirm beliefs we do not hold, because truth is among these great, fundamental goods. We should give of ourselves to others because they are due our reverence, and perhaps, in some sense, our love. None of this means we should abandon common sense: there will always be people who would take advantage of us, and at times it is not only acceptable but just to protect ourselves. But we cannot allow ourselves to live in such fear of these inevitabilities that we harden our hearts against the possibility of acting beyond self-interest.

We should resist Christian civilizationists’ calls for nonbelievers to convert solely for the sake of leading purposeful lives or defending “the West.” Believers and nonbelievers alike should not want a Christendom that does not care whether Christianity is true. A more generous society does not need such an ersatz Christianity, anyway. Most people probably will not cultivate virtue in the name of a creed they do not really embrace, nor will the metaphysically indifferent fear divine consequences for failing to do so. It is more likely that we will come to virtue through truth than through falsehood. Caring about moral imperatives in the first place starts with the sense that people and things outside ourselves exist, and that they matter. Such intuitions invite the “intimate quivering of the soul” from which Constant thought both the pull to worship and the desire to sacrifice for others emerged.

Our first awareness of the worth of people and things outside ourselves is unsettling. Only once it has jolted us out of self-regard and oriented us toward others can we really seek the moral goods around which a generous society can be cultivated. Truth can certainly be transformative, as the experience of British writer Louise Perry has attested. Perry once embraced the civilizationalist approach, arguing from a secular perspective that Christianity and Christian ethics are good for women, children, and flourishing societies. At some point between last Easter and this one, that changed. She believes. It was, in her own words, the pursuit and recognition of truth that led her to cross the same mysterious barrier of belief to which I sometimes feel myself drawn.

Most of all, though, it is love that we must contemplate to properly understand sacrifice and self-gift. In the Christian account, Jesus experienced agony in the garden of Gethsemane before going willingly to his death. His decision to push past that hesitation, that fear, was not only for his divine mission but “for the joy that was set before him.” It was for that joy, being reunited with a healed humankind, that he endured the cross. Jesus, in other words, loved us. Through the gift of self in love, at least some of our sacrifices are less self-abnegation than chances to share in greater joy with others. The saints were not Kantians. They braved martyrdom in good humor because they understood that the souls of strangers were as incalculably precious as their own, but also in hopes of celebrating their fellow humans’ salvation: enjoying the good of the kingdom with as many beloved ones as possible.

Few of us will end up martyrs. But if we yearn for self-gift, another way of living becomes possible, now and for everyone. We are children and parents, husbands and wives, friends and community members. We will be called to leave work in the middle of the day to rescue a stranded friend, to stay up at night to feed a baby, to come to choir practice or a long-planned party on days we don’t feel like leaving the house. We will care for others in the hardest moments. Whenever we are broken open by true love for the divine or for other human beings, the seeds of more generous lives can be planted and the shoots can begin to grow.