Have you ever looked at someone and thought to yourself “their actions certainly don’t reflect their words”. A Muslim who drinks, a Christian who has premarital sex, or a Jew who eats pork? And despite their actions, they will claim time and time again that they are a Muslim, Christian, or Jew – no matter how little their actions reflect that. Oftentimes you might think that these people are lying hypocrites, but really, a large number of religious people are like that: religious. It is not faith, but religion.
Before getting into the meat of this discussion, I think it’s important to understand one thing: we shouldn’t judge anyone. It is clear from Matthew 7 that the standard we hold others to is the same standard we will be held to, and all of us have done much wrong. I don’t know what’s happening in any one person’s life, I don’t know their struggles or their beliefs. I am speaking from a larger perspective, speaking of the many people I’ve seen in my life, not of any individual person. When it comes to the individual, only God can know their heart.
The belief I know best is Christianity, where faith is emphasized, which is defined as a few different things across the internet. The Oxford dictionary gives it 2 definitions: firstly, complete trust in something, and secondly, the strong belief in the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual conviction rather than proof. These 2 definitions are one and the same to me, because, using the first definition you’d say you have faith in God, whereas with the second one you can just say I have faith.
With this, you could easily assume that the difference between religion and faith is the complete trust in the doctrines aka conviction, and this implies many other things.
But there is one thing wrong with the definition used: a lack of proof.
In order to have full faith, one must have reason to believe. The Bible does not ask that we have blind faith, but it provides us with many reasons to believe. God created us with logic and reason, and he expects us to conduct ourselves as such. Although there are many arguments for God, personal experience is most powerful since it cannot be argued. The basis of science is the scientific method, which emphasizes making conclusions based on observation. We don’t assume men have more teeth than women, and just run with this assumption without checking (Aristotle). This is what personal experience ultimately is: an experiment. After this you can ultimately use your observations as evidence to draw your own conclusions.
Personal experience is undeniable proof of what you believe, a reason to believe. This is what results in the deep conviction the Bible asks us to have. (1 thes 1:5)
If one truly believes in something, they change their lives accordingly. All the decisions we make in life are based on whether they are worth the effort. Taking a real life example, to live longer you must exercise: if you feel exercising is too much work for the reward, you won’t do it. Similarly, if you love someone a lot you might be willing to help them move house, but if you don’t know them too well you won’t spend your day doing a monotonous task just for them.
We treat our beliefs in the same way. If someone truly believes in God with all the Christian doctrines, then they will undoubtedly change the way they live their lives to reflect this. This is because they see that whatever they are doing is worth it: if the Bible places importance on being kind, and I believe the Bible, then I must place importance on being kind.
The reason why people will claim to believe without changing the way they live their lives or following the doctrines of their proclaimed beliefs is belief without reason; as such they don’t have complete conviction.
In which case, why believe at all? There are many reasons for this.
To begin, there is what I will be referring to as ethnic religion. This refers to religions like Judaism or Hinduism, where it is very rare for someone to convert to the religion, whereas you become a Jew or Hindu by being born of Jewish of Hindu descent. I’m not using the term “ethnic religion” in its usual sense; instead, I am using it to refer to people who are only religious because their parents are, or because of the way they were brought up, including Christianity or Islam.
This is especially common here in the Middle East, where one’s religion and sect are written down on your ID. As such, someone’s religion becomes a part of their own identity, the same way their country of origin is.
For you to be from Egypt, you don’t have to be Muslim even if it is the most common religion followed there. Similarly, to be Catholic on your ID, you don’t have to go to church or believe in God at all.
These inherited beliefs eventually become tradition. If you’ve been going to church for a long time, then that is likely where all your friends go. As such, why would you stop going? Or if your family has been going to a specific church every Easter since you were little, why would you disappoint your mother by suddenly stopping. This is a form of religion that is not thought of outside of church. Sure you might pray while sitting in the building, but after leaving the building, God won’t come to mind until the next time you’re brought there.
I have experienced this first-hand. Growing up, I went to church on a weekly basis. I would never think about God outside of church, and I wouldn’t go if my parents gave me the option not to.
There is also support. In a study from Nature Human Behavior[1], researchers found that those who were more affected by local conflicts like wars were more likely to be members of religious groups years after the war had ended. This study covers three countries in which there were major conflicts, interviewing thousands of people, Christian and Muslim alike.
Another version of this support is emotional support. A paper from the journal of scientific study for religion found that there is an inverse relationship between strength of religious belief and psychological distress[2]. Another study[3] found that the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a large rise in the intensity of prayer, which, unlike simply going to church, results in greater strength of religious belief because it is something personal between you and God.
Lastly, there is intelligence. This is quite the controversial topic, and is in some ways related to the first two, but intelligence has an effect on religiosity as explored in the University of Edinburgh study[4] examining the relationship between intelligence and multiple domains of religious belief. A higher intelligence was consistently linked to lower strength religious belief, but it had the most impact in one area in particular: fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a measure of how conservative a participant was in their beliefs. An increase in intelligence and education correlated very closely with a decrease in fundamentalism. From my understanding, this is because those who aren’t well educated will never question their beliefs: they’re unable to question the ideas they inherited from their parents.
Interestingly, this study found that an increase in intelligence resulted in no change in spirituality, the most personal of the 6 metrics used to measure religiosity.
Despite this, religiosity, as discussed in the paper, truly is a multifaceted thing that cannot be summarized into just a few categories. On top of this, there are many confounding variables discussed in the paper and many more that I can still think of. Furthermore, the relationship between intelligence and religiosity is highly complex: the limitations of the study are discussed in the paper, but due to the subjective nature of religion I don’t believe it can fully be studied in this manner.
I don’t write this so that you can attempt to judge others, since you can never really know what’s going on in someone’s personal life. Is someone a bad person if their bad smoking habit comes back during a stressful period? I write this so that we can all reflect on our own beliefs, and truly be honest with ourselves. Do you have faith? True conviction in what you believe in, attempting to follow all the doctrines you speak of? Or is it just religion to you? Your parents’ beliefs passed onto you without thought, tradition, a form of support, or just leftover due to a lack of personal reflection?
[1] https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/files/henrich/files/henrich_et_al-2019-nature_human_behaviour.pdf
[2]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1387431
[3]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8557987/
[4]
Nate B Quill 
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