Experiences Shape Beliefs. They Shouldn’t Determine Them.

What makes Christians different from our secular neighbors?

Certainly, our worship of the risen Christ and love for others should mark us out. Our lifestyle—fighting against sin, and running after joyful holiness—should provide contrast too. But I’d like to submit one more subtle, but crucial difference. Christians care about what’s true. Not just what’s helpful or pleasant, but what’s objectively true.

In the ruins of postmodern deconstruction, many people feel the need for rock-solid convictions, but look for them in all the wrong places. And one of the most common places is experience. In Western culture especially, “my story, my truth,” is not just a self-help mantra. It’s a powerful dogma. Many people have no sense of truth beyond their own personal self-narrative.

Christianity challenges this. It’s Christianity’s objective character, its factfulness, that cuts a sharp contrast to the therapeutic spirituality of contemporary society. Evangelicals need to fight hard to keep the factfulness of Christianity before us, and to hold onto it, despite temptations in a polarized cultural moment to surrender our belief formation to experience. Our experiences shape our beliefs, but they shouldn’t determine them.

Current Challenges

Not long ago I was listening to an evangelical writer give an interview about the writer’s own political and theological journey. The interviewer noticed that the writer seemed less conservative and less traditional these days than in the recent past, and had sometimes received criticism—including some insulting, demeaning comments—from fellow evangelicals for it.

In response, the writer talked at length about feeling betrayed by his fellow evangelicals. They had, in his view, taken a hypocritical, harsh, and cynical turn. The writer felt an understandable hurt and confusion over some of the ideological realignment that had been going on within his tribe the last few years.

It’s Christianity’s objective character, its factfulness, that cuts a sharp contrast to the therapeutic spirituality of contemporary society.

And yet, after I listened to his remarks, I realized the writer had not actually explained his altered political or theological beliefs in terms of being persuaded that his new positions were true. Instead, when asked about convictions, he talked about people: the people who had betrayed principles, the people who had made (in his view) serious errors of moral judgment, and the people who had been cruel to this man. This gave the impression that his shifting beliefs had more to do with reacting to people than being persuaded by principles.

To be sure, cruelty from those you counted as friends or at least fellow Christians can be devastating. But it was remarkable that even in a conversation ostensibly about belief, the focus was on experiences. I was sympathetic to his plight, but convinced that, even if everything he had said about his former tribe was true, he had essentially subordinated the search for what’s true beneath the search for what’s pleasant.

Personal Pragmatism

When someone talks about why they’ve changed their convictions about something, they increasingly refer to negative experiences more often than persuasive arguments. Just in the last few months, I’ve seen prominent figures change denominations and talk more about the unkind or foolish people in their old tradition than about the new biblical evidence pushing them toward new convictions about baptism or polity.

I’ve seen writers announce major theological shifts on crucial topics like sexuality and gender, and more or less admit that the Scriptural truthfulness of their new beliefs is less urgent to them than the niceness of people who hold their new belief and the meanness of the people who still hold the old belief.

This is often described as a symptom of tribalism. There’s truth in that, but at a deeper level, it’s an expression of pragmatism—the kind that has often been a defining feature of American Christianity.

When a person’s beliefs shift after being presented with new evidence or arguments, the shift tends to relocate this person into a different social setting. But the dynamic I am describing occurs when a person relocates into a different social context, and changed beliefs follow. It’s not so much about losing faith in a creed, but losing faith in somebody. There’s a growing tendency to then identify the person in whom we have lost faith as the sum total of their beliefs, and change our thinking accordingly. “Because X person did Y bad thing, this must mean X person was wrong about Z idea.”

There’s something natural and effortless about this. Collapsing beliefs with behaviors eliminates all cognitive or emotional dissonance. It feels clean and allows emotions a lot of space to work. By contrast, it’s hard to separate personalities from doctrines, to stay committed to convictions even when others holding those convictions behave badly.

When someone talks about why they’ve changed their convictions about something, they increasingly will refer to negative experiences more often than persuasive arguments.

I’m not claiming that this kind of instinct is new. Human experiences, especially suffering, always contribute to the shaping of our beliefs. Job’s wife did not suggest he curse God and die because she’d fallen under the spell of some dazzling atheistic syllogism. She was genuinely suffering too, having lost her children and possessions. Suffering does not press foremost on our intellect, but on our heart. And our heart can exert powerful influence over our head.

Yet modern society makes this timeless dynamic even more intense. Western people have an unprecedented amount of power and freedom to choose what we believe. We can bounce from philosophy to philosophy, religion to religion, worldview to worldview, at will. While our friends may think us flighty, no one questions our right to do this. So the very notion of truth itself becomes liquified. But experiences feel more solid. Experiences are objectively our own and cannot be unexperienced or invalidated. In a post-truth digital age, our stories and lived experiences become the highest source of authority.

This includes the way we experience social settings and relationships—does a community give us good or bad vibes? Our felt experience of other people becomes more reliable to us than the more nebulous realm of “truth” claims. This partly explains why “belonging precedes believing” has become a popular (if unhelpful) phrase in church circles.

In these and other ways, almost all of modern life is a gigantic plausibility structure for the kind of pragmatism that lets experiences dictate beliefs.

Two Realities

As universal as this impulse might be, we cannot surrender to it without surrendering something very important. Outsourcing our search for truth to our experiences—letting our beliefs dutifully follow our sense of who’s nice to us and who’s not, who’s admirable and who isn’t—betrays two fundamental realities.

1) Truthfulness is not determined by friendliness or even morality.

There is no person so good they cannot be wrong, or so wicked they cannot get something right. Scripture describes many times when the people of God utterly betray their charter and covenant. In fact, in the biblical narrative, this happens more often than it doesn’t. And Scripture is clear-eyed about the fact that such moral hypocrisy contributes to a plausibility structure of unbelief, for which the hypocrites will be judged. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the hypocrites are wrong about who God is, or that the unbelieving nations are morally justified in rejecting their message because of the messengers. Just like the tense harmony of sovereignty and human agency, or of incarnate humanity and full deity, the Bible simply presents the reality of hypocrisy, and the moral obligation to believe truth, together, hand-in-hand.

2) Others have suffered and held fast; we owe it to them to do the same.

To jettison our convictions because of our hurt at the hands of people who shared them would be to belittle the sufferings of those who have gone through this and still held fast to truth. Mistreatment by those who share our core beliefs can be horribly unsettling, but it’s not rare (Scripture, church history, and contemporary life are full of examples). The world, the flesh, and the devil are active waging war—even within the church. We have to be honest about this and not convince ourselves that our suffering is unique or unprecedented.

If we abandon our doctrine because some with whom we shared these convictions betray us, we’re admitting it’s not Jesus we’ve been following, but other people. There must be space in our theology and in our lives to hold firm to truth no matter who is or who isn’t joining us.

Man, Not Rabbit

C.S. Lewis understood this. In his essay, “Man or Rabbit,” Lewis was asked the question, “Can someone be good without being a Christian?” Christianity, Lewis argued, is a narrative of reality that demands to be either believed or rejected: “One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing,” he reflected. “When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.”

Christianity claims to give an account of facts—to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

It’s certainly true that the church’s love is the mark of its discipleship to Jesus. It’s also true that our relationships and experiences deeply shape us, creating plausibility structures that last a lifetime. But we must be careful to not overstate this. The church’s integrity bears witness to the truth of its message, but it does not determine it.

The church’s integrity bears witness to the truth of its message, but it does not determine it.

Experiences and suffering shape our beliefs, but they must not dictate them. At the end of the day, it’s the gospel that shapes the church, not the other way around.

In a polarized, contentious evangelical moment, Christians should hold fast to our creed and our community, without confusing them. Let’s cultivate deep conviction in the total truthfulness of Scripture, so that even when the world would say we should give up on it, we know whom we have believed.