On Faith, Part II: Faith, Crutches, & The Opiate of the People
In the third of this five-part series on faith, I’d like to explain why I’m starting off my substack series on this particular subject and delving so deeply into it: faith is the foundation of all things in our human experience. And I don’t mean that faith is necessarily and exclusively something that lives within the context of a religious or spiritual lense. Faith is something that we have in basically everything we do — even in the most mundane tasks; for, faith requires a belief in something. And to do anything whatsoever, we have to have a belief that we are able to do that thing (even if the belief is only that we are able to attempt an effort towards such a thing). In this way, beliefs are actually tools we have to help guide us through literally every experience we have as human beings. As, again, we have to believe that we can do a thing in order to attempt to undertake that task, whatever it might be. We have to put our belief, our faith, into something.
That said, from a spiritual, religious, or even existential standpoint, faith does tend to be a solution. Faith is frequently a crutch — which is not meant to be a critique of its usage. There are so many things that we do in this world that are crutches, that are solutions, that are our answers to all the difficulties that life gives to us. So, one person’s choice to come to faith should be no more ridiculed than any number of coping mechanisms that a person might employ on this journey through the tremendous difficulties and challenges that life presents to us.
This is usually where the old accusation shows up: religion is the “opiate of the people.” Karl Marx - who coined the term - did, however, mean it to be a sharp critique of religion on the whole, and one that is, on some levels, a valid one — but maybe not for the reasons that are often assumed.
There is valor in the fact that faith can be an opiate. For, faith is an ‘answer’ that requires no further questioning. It is an answer that can absolve us of the struggle - of the difficulty - of being a human being. When we say, “It is just God’s will”, or “My faith guides me”, we release ourselves of our own agency. We release ourselves, at least for a moment, from the demand to resolve what it is that confronts us. From one angle, that looks like weakness. From another, it looks like survival.
But the truth is that we are all already leaning on, depending on, and believing in something. Very few of us are standing upright without any support, staring reality in the face without flinching. For most of us, life is too heavy for that. So we reach for something that lets us continue.
Faith often becomes that something.
The question, then, is not whether faith is a crutch: the far more interesting question is what kind of crutch it is, and what it does to us while we lean on it.
If faith remains only conceptual, it can anesthetize us; it becomes one more idea we hold in our minds about how things are. It becomes a neat theological answer, or a doctrinal formula, or a slogan. “God has a plan.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “The universe will provide.”
These phrases can be soothing, but they can also distance us from The Real. They invite us to stop looking. They invite us to stop listening. They make it easier to ignore the actual suffering in front of us because we have a pre–packaged interpretation of why it is there. This is what concepts and ideas do: they distance us from what is. Concepts are not real; they rely on a consciousness - on a slew of other ideas - to sustain them. They need us to keep repeating them in order to survive. Over time, if we only ever move in that conceptual layer, the distance between that layer and Verity grows ever wider.
Faith can easily be folded into that conceptual layer; and when it does, faith becomes a system, a culture, an institution that offers the comfort of ready–made answers, but pulls us away from a living relationship with what is.
Yet faith does not have to be that.
Faith can also be a crutch that helps us walk more deeply into reality — not away from it. It can be something that is earned, not given. Something tested through experience. Something that we arrive at after life has chewed us up and spit us out and we have somehow continued on within it anyway. In that form, faith is not an escape from reality; it is an access point into it.
And yet, it is still a solution. It is still a way out in the sense that it gives us a path forward. But it is a way out that goes through. It does not spare us from the unknown. It does not guarantee that we will be safe, or happy, or rewarded. It simply insists that continuing is possible.
To me, that is a very different kind of opiate: it does not numb. It does not pretend that the pain is not real. It does not hide the complexity of the world behind a doctrinal curtain. It says, “Yes, this is difficult. Yes, this does not make sense. Yes, you may never get the answers you think you need. Keep going anyway.”
That is a crutch I am not ashamed to use.
In my book, A Philosophical War, I argue that concepts and systems so often pull us away from what is real — what I call “Verity”. Faith, when it collapses into mere belief, becomes another part of that machinery. But faith, when it is lived rather than merely thought, can also be one of the ways we step outside that machinery. It can be one of the ways we join ourselves back to the world.
So, when I hear that faith is the opiate of the people, I do not rush to defend religion as such. I simply ask:
If we are going to lean on something in order to survive this life, do we want an opiate that dulls us to reality, or a crutch that helps us walk more honestly into it?
