Reflection I: Moral, Believing Animals

This is the first of three reflections I with to write on three books which are brilliant and interrelated. I myself read Jamie Smith's Desiring the Kingdom first, which led me through footnotes and references to Christian Smith's Moral, Believing Animals and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World. In this series, however, I will start with Moral, Believing Animals because it is foundational; indeed its subtitle explains that it discusses "Human Personhood and Culture." In this post I will consider the contributions of Christian Smith's book to understanding human nature and the society. Then I will shift gears in a later post to For the Life of the World and then bring both into dialogue with Desiring the Kingdom.

Christian Smith begins by defining human beings as believing animals. With this definition, Smith breaks with a Modernist understanding of man which sees rationality and thought as fundamental human qualities (i.e. cogito ergo sum). Instead, Smith posits that humans cannot escape relying on faith to understand themselves and their world. We always begin with presuppositions taken in faith to form our theories and even our higher-level beliefs. Thus at the core of humanity lie, in Wolterstorff's words, control beliefs which serve as a root for further theories which branch from the control beliefs.

Of course, the question "what is it that humans place faith in?" naturally follows. In response, Smith sees control beliefs as part of larger narratives. Smith defines narrative as "a form of communication that bestows meaning...by specifying their interactive or cause-and-effect relations to the whole" (p.63). Humans place faith in narratives, believing in the historicity of events or actions which can provide meaning to their lives by demonstrating how the events of their existence cohere and point toward something greater, the climax or resolution of the story. Faith narratives thus generally include an account of the event of creation as well as an eschatology which provide the beginning and end of the story and thus direction for the middle in which we live.

Still, believed narratives are not necessarily religious. Rather, Smith defines religion as the belief in the superempirical (supernatural), a transcendent reality which impinges on the present and gives it meaning by drawing the present up into the transcendent in the same way that all narratives draw their present details up into a larger framework. But a narrative could deny the superempirical, claiming a materialism or secularism that nevertheless is a belief, not a certainty, but denies any religious qualities.

Having affirmed humans as believing creatures who place their faith in larger narratives in return for purpose and direction, Smith moves on to consider the origins of human society. He beings by noting that humans naturally draw distinctions between the sacred and profane, distinctions which often arise from control beliefs. These distinctions quickly evolve into divisions between moral and immoral, which then arrange themselves into larger structures that Smith calls "moral orders." A moral order is the basis of a society, all parts of the society are judged and created in accordance with the moral order, leaving the aberrant to be ostracized or outlawed and the moral to be affirmed and rewarded. From this basic social framework humans create governments and cultures to define a position for themselves within their world.

The observations that Christian Smith makes are very basic but have widespread implications. Soon, we will examine how Jamie Smith evaluates Moral, Believing Animals and adds some observations of his own to provide an even more robust view of human nature and society.