Belief And Trust

“Belief has nothing to do with truth.” This is another line from Percival Everett’s wonderful novel James, the story of the slave Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was struck by the line not only because of its simplicity and its clarity, but also because it caused me to pause and consider its myriad applications to the times in which we live as well as to the pieces of history that haunt us.

I considered first its application to religion. I grew up a Roman Catholic, attending parochial schools for 11 of my 12 years of primary and secondary education. As a Roman Catholic I was taught to embrace many unprovables and improbables: from events that no one witnessed or for which there was no evidence to circumstances or conditions that were, simply, articles of faith. For example: I was taught that I was born with Original Sin staining my soul. The only way to be rid of this sin was to be baptized. If I had died before being baptized, my stained soul would have been consigned for eternity to a place called Limbo. I was also taught that I—and every human being—had a guardian angel with me at all times. I was taught that the mother of Jesus, a young woman called Mary, was the only human being ever to be born without Original Sin, which made her a worthy vessel for the conception of Jesus. The vehicle of this conception, I was taught, was the Holy Ghost (renamed later the Holy Spirit), and Mary learned about her unexpected pregnancy via the visitation of an angel called Gabriel. There are other occurrences born from the Bible that I was also taught: that water covered the earth for forty days and forty nights and the only survivors were a man called Noah and his family as well as a male and female of every single species of every creature walking the face of the earth at that time; that a man called Moses heard God speaking to him from a burning bush; that an angel stopped Abraham in the act of killing his son Isaac. These stories and others like them were presented as facts, and for my entire childhood I believed them.

All religions, I think, ask the same of people. If you consider the religions with which you might be familiar, you will no doubt come up with your own list of stories or circumstances presented as facts. Yet upon reflection, I predict you will find there is nothing that can be offered as actual proof of their veracity.

Belief does not require proof. It requires only the willingness of the individual not to question that which he or she is being taught or being told. So the individual makes a leap of faith into belief, and that leap of faith is based on trust.

We always have a choice when it comes to trust. We can trust blindly; we can be persuaded to trust; or we can decide that trust must be earned. Thus, when someone says “Trust me” or “You can trust me,” we are faced with those three choices.

In politics, trusting blindly or trusting without question means accepting candidates as the people they claim to be. No true delving is done into any aspect of their lives: whether that be the nature of their pasts or the quality of their characters. Since no examination of the candidates is deemed necessary when they are trusted blindly, what they say or do is of no real consequence and has no bearing on the trust people place in them. Cult leaders operate like this. For example, no one in Jonestown would have drunk the cyanide-laced Kool-aid without having had blind trust in Jim Jones.

Being persuaded to trust, on the other hand, can be said to develop from one person’s ability to “speak the speech trippingly” and another person’s willingness to listen and to believe what they hear. For example, the sale and purchase of “miracle” products fall into this category. The sales pitch involves a promise, from losing weight effortlessly while eating whatever one wishes to making vast amounts of cash by investing in one scheme or another. If people listening to the pitch are persuaded, they make the choice to believe in what they’re being told, and they hand over their money. In politics, an example might be Donald Trump’s 2016 promise to build a wall on the US/Mexico border and to have Mexico pay for that wall. Many voters were persuaded by rhetoric that included the wall’s ability to keep out of the US the rapists, drug lords, and murderers who were ostensibly pouring over the border. They believed it would happen because they had been persuaded to trust the speaker of the promise.

Deciding that trust is something that must be earned is the longer route to belief. In election years, it involves critical listening, critical reading, and critical thinking. The plethora of social media in our lives and the absence of reliable political journalism, however, make these activities extremely difficult. After a televised political debate, for example, unless we immediately switch off our televisions, a hundred talking heads on various channels tell us “who won” and “what this will do to the polls” before we in the audience even have the slightest chance to digest what the debaters said in the first place. In another example, if the President gives a State of the Union speech, the opposing party immediately gives its rebuttal, and we are left to wonder what the state of the union actually is when two parties can see it so differently.

It’s my opinion that, ultimately, the truth that leads to belief has to rise from a person’s actions: not what that person is doing now—although that’s helpful—but what that person has done in the past. If indeed as Shakespeare put it, “What’s past is prologue”, then behaviors from a person’s history serve as indicators of what that person’s future behaviors will probably be. If those behaviors align with one’s morals, ethics, and values then trust could well be warranted. If those behaviors do not align with one’s morals, ethics, and values, the way of wisdom might be to withhold trust—and belief—altogether.

Elizabeth George
Seattle, Washington
4 September 2024