E31 The Future of Faith
The way we find, adopt, and practice faith is changing. In this episode of 12 Geniuses, Don MacPherson speaks with writer, founder, and host of On Being, Krista Tippett. Together they dive into the way we practice faith, what it means to be human, and the dichotomy between good and evil. They also discuss how religion will animate the 21st century, including the next religious reformation, the relationship between science and religion, and the rise of the religious “nones.”
Season Three of the podcast is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode provides insight into the future of faith in order to understand how religion, science, and society will all intersect in the coming years.
Since the mid-1990s, Krista Tippett has studied the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life. Krista is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a New York Times Bestselling Author, and a National Humanities Medalist. She is also the Founder and Host of On Being.
Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. For 25 years, I've been helping organizations and the leaders who run them improve performance. Now I travel the world to interview geniuses about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today's guest is Krista Tippett. Krista is founder and CEO of The On Being Project. She is the host of the wildly popular On Being Podcast and is a best-selling author. In our conversation, we discuss the intersection of science and religion, what it means to be human, and the future of faith.
Krista, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Krista Tippett:
Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Don:
I would like to start with your background. I know you grew up in Oklahoma, and I know that your grandfather was important in your life. Could you just talk a little bit about Oklahoma, your upbringing, and then how you made it to West Germany after college?
Krista:
Well, that's a big leap there. Yeah. I mean, I think it was… I grew up in Oklahoma, as you say. I grew up in a small town, which I think is probably just as defining. Very small world. Yeah, my grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher. It was the Bible Belt, but church was really more than church. It was really the center of social life and culture. Yeah, I grew up in a very known world where the cast of characters was clear and there were a lot of certainties. I always had a lot of questions too, and actually got into drama and debate when I was in high school. And it was a debate that took me to a summer camp in Chicago, the summer before my senior year in high school, which gave me this wild idea to go out of state to college, which landed me at Brown, very improbably.
Well, I felt like I had left Oklahoma. I think going from Oklahoma to Brown felt like going to another planet, and I felt kind of fearless after that. Then I really wanted to see the world and learn a language. It was the Cold War years and Brown had this really exceptional and completely unusual program, exchange program with East Germany, with Communist East Germany, where I went for a semester in 1982. It was just seven years before the Wall would fall, but it was absolutely unimaginable, which is an experience that shapes me, that knowing that the world can change utterly without us being able to predict it. But that got me really hooked on the Cold War Political Dynamics and the division of Germany into east and west. And I ended up eventually in West Berlin first, as a journalist, and then as a diplomat for a few years. So, I had some great adventures in my 20s.
Don:
In your first book, Speaking of Faith, you talk about the Cold War clash and good and evil, and this binary sense of the world. I have sensed something since the fall of the Wall, and since this idea of dividing the world into good and evil, a level of complexity that many people have a hard time understanding.
Krista:
I think our brains resist complexity, but it's the only way to befriend reality. I don't just do it. I really seek it. I think it was something about making that leap. I mean like seeing how many different, literally different worlds there are within the world, and in fact somehow understood that each of us carries our own little planet. The only way to approach that meaningfully is to acknowledge how difficult it is and how contradictory, and also how completely fascinating.
Don:
You went from West Germany and now you are exploring the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, community, poetry in the arts. How did you make that leap? Or what were the steps necessary in order to get there?
Krista:
Well, it's not something that I, again, foresaw or would've planned. It was really, I think it was always taking the next step. I'd spent these, a couple of really exciting years, my first couple of years in West Berlin as a journalist, as a stringer for the New York Times. I had a great experience being able to learn as a reporter from fantastic correspondence, and what I think, at that time, was one of the great newspapers in the world. And I was pretty good at it, and I certainly learned skills about asking questions and being able to synthesize, and summarize, and think on my feet, and write on my feet, that has served me in everything I've done since. It was such an interesting experience to do something that looked so good on paper and looked so impressive on my resume and really wasn't needing something deep inside me.
For one thing, if you do that kind of reporting, you really have to get excited about waking up in the morning to see what the world is going to throw at you. Whereas I'm more inclined to want to have done a story yesterday and want to go deeper today and deeper still tomorrow. And so, I ended up moving away from that, getting involved in diplomacy just because who I knew in the divided city, which also was an experience that has served me ever since; not just asking good questions, but really being a listener and seeing what it means to put oneself in a bridging space. But that too ended up not feeling like what I wanted to be doing with my life forever; didn't feel like what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I ended up just being so absorbed by the human dynamics of people; of one country, one history, one culture one language being split into two; was this vast human experiment, this vast social experiment. But what really captivated my imagination, and I think captivated me ever after, is seeing how people create dignity, and beauty, and intimacy in their lives, or fail to do so, and how that is not dependent on how much one has; what side of the Wall one lives on. And so, in that world, it was a literal wall, but there are all kinds of walls we construct. And that eventually led me to go do a Master's of Divinity to study theology. Not because I wanted to be ordained, but because I wanted to be asking those great questions that theology asks and delving into text, and tradition, and this repository of human beings across time and space asking why we're here.
Out of that experience, again, I did not predict that I would get back into media again. I would not have predicted that I would get into radio, which was a new medium, which I got into in the early 21st century. But I think following those particular questions led to an interest in all of those aspects of the work I do now; as you said, spiritual inquiry, but also science, and community, and poetry, and the arts. So, my show, which started out with the name Speaking of Faith, really trying to… At that point, my question was why we didn't speak about this part of human life with all the complexity that it has, which… with all the seriousness that we give to other subjects like politics and economics when this part of being human flows through those and informs them.
I'm as interested in moral imagination as I am in truth or moralizing. That was the focus starting the early show in the early 2000s when religion was very much in the headlines. But as the show grew up and evolved, it really became much more expansive and spaciously about how 21st century people are asking these questions of what it means to be human and how we want to live. And then really it has, for me, crystallized in these particular threads of that. So, spiritual inquiry, of course, but also what we're learning about what it means to be human through science. How the arts, and especially poetry, help us speak truths and convey truths about ourselves as well as our aspirations. And yeah, community, who we will be to each other, which I think is really the defining question of this century.
Don:
The question — what does it mean to be human? — is really fascinating, and you've been studying it for years now. How is it changing, or is it on a constant trajectory of change?
Krista:
This question is as old as we are. There's something elemental about it. But certainly, the context in which we ask the question, the tools with which we explore it, the experiences we have, both individually and publicly, that confront us with this question have really radically changed in my lifetime, and certainly, I think, in this century. In my mind, the internet and the digital world is not… I mean, for all, it's become kind of a center in which we… And even very literally, the technologies that we have and the digital world have given rise to something like artificial intelligence, which, in a very linear way, asks that question of what it means to be human and asks the question of whether technology could do it better.
But I'm more interested in the ways… I think the digital landscape has just created this whole new canvas for us to see the complexity, and difficulty, and beauty, and expansiveness of the human condition up on a big giant-sized screen. I think one of the ways this question of what it means to be human is being raised is through our encounter with what we see there of ourselves and what our technology is giving us in a larger-than-life way to grapple with ourselves. The other thing that's changed that I find so fascinating, and mostly really, really hope giving and life giving, is how science, especially the life sciences, but even physics, have just become this companion for us to marvel at the cosmos we inhabit, but also the bodies we inhabit.
We're basically on this frontier of our brains, which is completely new in the history of our species. I just did an interview with Jane Goodall and when she started studying chimpanzees 60 years ago. That was part of what we were starting to understand is that in some ways there's continuity; that we are part of the natural world, but also the extraordinary way that our intellect and our capacity for language really pushed us into a whole new sphere in the animal kingdom. And now, really just in the last 20, 30 years, which is just no time at all, we are understanding things about our minds and the connection between our brains and our bodies, and including the complexity and the contradictions, even when we think how we're never quite as reasonable as we think we are or as logical, but really just how remarkable.
I think that this science teaches us that we are capable of change; that none of us has to be born with a personality or character that we can't form, that we can't actually keep molding and keep shifting across a lifespan. And I think also it keeps showing us the absurd gap between what we're capable of and a lot of the contradictions and shortcomings in our society. And this pandemic that we're in, as you and I are speaking, is also really throwing that into relief. But I think those two things stand side by side in terms of what we're learning, how much work there is to do, but that we are capable of doing it, of rising to that occasion if we choose to.
Don:
You've touched on a lot of things there, and I want to go a little deeper on science and religion. There's a quote from you that both science and religion are set to animate the 21st century with new vigor. You wrote that about 10 years ago. In what ways has religion animated this century and how do you project that it will continue to animate this century?
Krista:
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Because I think what I was writing about was the continuing vigor of religion, the fact that, although in the academy and in journalism, and to some extent in Western society as a whole, there was this assumption coming out of the 20th century that religion would continue to recede to the sidelines. There was certainly a practice of not seeing it at the center of human life, putting it in a compartment, not imagining that it animated humanity as much as other things like politics, like our economic lives. I think at the beginning of the 21st century, certainly with 9/11, but on many other fronts, that the fact that, that is not true as laid bare — religion as an animating force or the power of religion that can also be manipulated towards very destructive ends also for individuals, but for communities reasserted itself in the public imagination.
Don:
That was the day that changed my life in terms of my relationship with religion.
Krista:
September 11th?
Don:
Yes.
Krista:
And how did it do that? In what sense?
Don:
I just couldn't wrap my head around that level of evil in the name of God or somebody associating it in the name of God. To this day, yeah, it just perplexes me.
Krista:
Yes, it was spectacularly catastrophic and dramatic. Yeah, and it was a catastrophic way for, I think, most Americans to wake up, to become aware, perhaps for the first time, actively of the religion of Islam, a religion at that time already, of over a billion people already at that time about to become the second, or it was the second largest religion in the world. And there just wasn't an awareness of that. And it was a tragic and terrible way for that to register. I think what we, what we experienced without probably knowing how to process… I don't know. When were you born?
Don:
‘68.
Krista:
Yeah, so there was this end of history idea that was in 1989, I think, the year the Wall fell, and it was put forward by an American academic, and it was widely ridiculed or scoffed at, but I think actually it was very representative of a cultural inclination we had to think. That now that the Cold War had been won, the world would get richer and more peaceful, democracy would prevail and everything would be great forever and ever, amen. And there was so much that was wrong with that. There was a hubris about an idea about what is inevitably right about democracy and capitalism, or the idea that they always go hand in hand, or I think maybe the idea that we'd figured democracy out.
But also, something that was wrong with that was not seeing how the Cold War had co-opted the end of colonialism and. The Cold War put a lid on tight and manipulated these ethnic and religious passions and traditions in so many societies. And so, one of the things that happened when the Cold War ended is that, back to that word complexity, a lot of complexity and also a lot of human reaction to tragedy, a lot of pain was out on the surface to be expressed, to be co-opted, to be manipulated. I think September 11th, 2001 was that making its way heard, its making itself heard.
Don:
I want to ask you about religious reformation and the next religious reformation. And you've kind of alluded to it a little bit, and this ability to use the internet and seek community. Could you describe what you mean or what is meant by religious reformation and what the benefits of being able to explore religion are?
Krista:
It's a tricky term to use because it has one very precise meaning in history when we talk about the reformation; capital R. In Europe, that was where just about everybody was Christian. In fact, just about everybody was Catholic at some point while the reformation splintered into so many different variations on Protestantism. But clearly anything that happens now, the starting point is so different from a kind of monolithic, inherited religious identity. In fact, that is one of the really extraordinary tectonic shifts of our world. Again, just in the last couple of decades that we have moved so rapidly in the U.S., and I do want to specify in the U.S., in Western or northern Europe, and in different ways in other countries, but certainly here. Until not that long ago, just about everybody was born into a religious tradition, an inheritance.
And it defined you with almost genetic effect like ethnicity. For a very long time, in this country, until not that long ago, people probably not only inherited that identity, however profound or superficial it was, the identity was important. And probably also went to the same church or synagogue that their parents and grandparents went to. And in a very short period of time, that has changed. And so, 10 years ago, I think, you suddenly had these new statistics about 30% of people under 30 professing no religious affiliation. And I'm sure that number is larger now. So, the reformation is not going from one allegiance to another. I mean, it's much more dispersed and it's unrooted.
Some people actually find their way back or into a rooted tradition, but what is new is that even if they eventually claim the tradition which is their mother tongue or spiritual homeland, the tradition of their family, it is a choice. We are in this new situation; this utterly new situation in the history of our species, of crafting our own spiritual and religious lives and identities. And crafting them also in a world in which it may or may not be a house of worship or an affiliation. The books we read, it may be online gatherings, it may be rituals that we choose or lives of ritual that we put together ourselves. I also see a lot of depth forming, a lot of insistence on the part of young people; that if they're going to have a spiritual life, if they're going to take religion seriously, they're going to insist that it be true to its own highest and deepest values, which include that we don't just get to have inner lives without measuring that against the quality of our outer presence in the world.
To me, those are the features of our reformation. It looks more like the creation of monastic orders, which was, again, very diverse and diffuse in the early Roman, or in the early Christianity, which were like spiritual renewal movements that left the motherland, literally and figuratively; it looks more like that than it looks like the Protestant reformation. It's really fascinating, and I think there's a lot of dignity, integrity in it.
Don:
I'd like to talk a little bit about science versus religion. I know you're exploring science and religion, but it seems like one of the things that is really hampering our country and being able to come together and have conversations is this idea that you need to choose a side — I'm a science focused person or I'm a belief person. And we're seeing it now. We're recording this May 27th, 2020. We're somewhere in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic and people are choosing between religion and science. But why is a non-binary acceptance of both science and religion important to the way that we live?
Krista:
Well, it's important to the way we live because it's the nature of reality. These are complimentary aspects of the human enterprise. In fact, for most of history, the history of religion and of science, they were in conversation with each other. For me, it's not about whether scientists and religious people are in dialogue or whether scientists are themselves religious. I mean, there's plenty of that to go around contrary to the stereotypes. But in our life together, in our history as a species, the things we're learning on scientific frontiers about ourselves that flow into our self-understanding and ultimately into the way we structure, and imagine, and solve problems, and build, and discover.
And then this part of us that looks inside, and that asks questions, and that claims agency, and that thinks, beyond the temporal to the eternal, these parts of us are interacting and the insights we're gaining from both are interacting. I mean, one thing that I think is so important to put on the table on this subject, as you raised it, is that the very loud voices who do a good job of getting themselves out there don't represent as many of us as you would infer from the coverage they get in journalism. I really believe that the vast, vast majority of us, including professional scientists, including deeply devoutly religious people across many traditions, live with these parts of ourselves and with the fruits of these different disciplines and traditions. Hold these things in a creative and fruitful tension, if it even feels like attention at all, which I don't even think it does most of the time.
The tension in my mind is fabricated and whipped up. I think that where, in the pandemic, this terrible thing is happening that is fear-based, and that whenever you can hook into fear in human beings, you have got yourself something very powerful to work with.
Don:
I was going to say that I really like the way that you wrote about Charles Darwin in the book, Einstein's God, and his seeming reverence for religion and his understanding of what his publication might do to religion. It was just very thoughtful. He approached it in a very thoughtful way, and I found that to be very important to include in there. His Origin of Species; we talk about that often as this very divisive work.
Krista:
Right. We talk about him as the original culture warrior.
Don:
Correct, yeah.
Krista:
But actually, he was the last of the great classic scientists who, however fitfully, held these things together in a conversation.
Don:
I think that was very important. I also want to share something that happened to me when I was reading this book. So, this is Einstein's God, the first sentence of the first chapter is Albert Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2 remains difficult for me to fully grasp. And I must have read that equation hundreds of times and just accepted it as the theory of relativity. But two pages later, I write in the margin, “There is faith in science. I accept the theory of relativity without question.”
Krista:
Yeah.
Don:
And I don't know if this was your intention with the book, but at that moment I realized, oh my gosh, the people standing in front of the church when I was a kid were wearing robes and talking about things that the congregants had to accept through their faith. But so much of my science and what I accept from a scientific perspective, I accept this through faith, and it's people in lab coats, not in robes. Then I was able to read the rest of the book with this idea in mind. And so, that did change the way I look at religion now.
Krista:
I love that. I like to also put the words 'faith and evolution' in the same sentence in this way that faith in any life has an evolutionary quality. And even in the most faithful lives I've known, the people most deeply steeped in traditions, the same words, the same article of belief held such transformed connotations from the beginning of a life to the end of a life. That the same thing could be true, but what it means, how you understand it, and therefore how you live it, if you're breathing, if there's vitality in it, it is always evolving. That's the nature of growth. That's not any kind of failing.
Don:
There's another quote, “I have no idea what religion will look like a century from now, but this evolution of faith will change us all.” So, it's very appropriate based on what you just said. How do you see it changing us? How do you see this evolution of faith changing us over the next decade, or 20 years, or 50 years?
Krista:
Well, I mean, at best, it puts this part of ourselves back in our hands. As I said, it's something that we choose consciously, that we craft consciously. What we also have to acknowledge is that this is a time of real… Seminaries are closing down, churches are emptying out, right? I mean, religious traditions, those religious traditions which inhabited this reality of people being born into them generation after generation, that's not a model that is viable now. That's not happening anymore. I don't personally believe that the traditions will disappear because there's this interesting thing that happens when new generations look to them in a spirit of curiosity and discovery, even with an insistence that they’d better be true to what they're supposed to be about. I think of our traditions as containers for elemental truths and questions, and certainly also for a conversation across generations, across the generations of our species.
And that's so important, that's so additive to anything that I can make up myself, right? So, I think that there remains this interplay between the intelligence and the rituals, really what I think of as the spiritual technologies of our traditions that they have carried forward in time in the very modern search that new people in the world are embarking on of their own volition. And right now, in this extraordinary strange moment where worship services, like everything else, have gone online, and like a lot of other things, it's hard know; it's kind of hard to imagine that anything just goes back to the way it was before, right? But in this sense, and in the sense of a lot of our institutions, I think things were already not working as they once worked.
So, it's a time of undoing and a time that calls for creativity not… There is a common trajectory that I see of people who set out on a search; that they discover fundamental elemental aspects of text, and community, and liturgy, and prayer; forms to hold and honor this part of ourselves and intelligence that you can't make up for yourself, and actually that you want to carry together with other people. To me, that's the future of religion is about what does that synergy look like when the depths of the tradition meets it searchingly and when human beings meet this part of themselves searchingly and also look for what previous generations have known and created that we can be part of?
Don:
Human beings now have incredible capabilities around creating machines and creating intelligent machines. And we now have the ability to create designer babies and de-extinct species or create new species. These are the things that God, and God alone, was able to do before now. And now that we have these capabilities, what does that do to faith or to religion? Does it make us want to get more close to our faith or religion, or does it make it less relevant?
Krista:
It's an older version of the science religion debate, which was this notion of the God of the gaps. This notion that religion is just holding out the space for the things we can't explain by way of science or reason, and that, that space gets smaller and smaller the more we figure out and the more we learn how to do. But there's also a really beautiful theological tradition that pushes back at that; that shows that in fact that's probably not the space religion should have been holding down in the first place. One of the great people who countered that was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi prison. And during World War II, he was a great, great German theologian who wrote a lot about Christian community and even wrote about, back then, what he called Religionless Christianity.
How the elements, the tenets, the truths, the enduring truths that Christianity brought into the world had to find their way through the world, even if they had to do that in the absence of the institutions. The institutions, as they did in Nazi Germany, utterly failed those truths. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “I want a God who's not at the edges and the margins and in the gaps, but right in the middle of the village.” How that God manifests is in how we treat each other and the worlds we make. I think also, in our time, we would have to add how we live as part of the creation, right? How we live with the natural world that is such a miracle, and that we have been so neglectful and we've had such hubris about. It's been a hubris against life itself.
And in fact, it's life upon which our lives depend. And those are also things we are coming to understand so much more clearly on our scientific and also our theological frontiers. So, I'm okay for technology to have the intelligent machines and the designer babies, and the extinct species. And these questions of, why are we here and does it really matter? And what does it mean to lead a worthy life? And why is that so difficult? And how can we be so terrible to each other? And also, isn't it amazing the depths of care to which human beings can rise in the worst of circumstances? Those are not even questions that technology or science try to approach. And so, this part of us is, as I said, it's a complimentary space, but it's a different space, and it demands different questions, and different parts of us, and different inner technologies.
Don:
I think you're right, and I think that is what will ultimately define us as humans is how we treat one another. In this new world, with all of these technologies, it really will come down to compassion, to empathy, to the willingness to help my brother or my sister and fellow human being. It's a beautiful conversation. Krista, thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
Krista:
Aw, thank you, Don. It's lovely. It's an honor to be part of this, and blessings to you.
Don:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. You can learn more about Krista Tippett and the On Being Project at onbeing.org. Among the upcoming episodes scheduled for Season 3 of the podcast, we'll explore the Future of Transportation, the Future of Reproduction, and the Future of War. Devin McGrath is our production assistant; Brian Bierbaum is our research and historical consultant; Toby, Tony, Jay, and the rest of the team at GL Productions in London make sure the sound and editing are phenomenal. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to 12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.